■ Cross-Strait Ties
PLA issues warning
The mouthpiece of the China's People's Liberation Army yesterday warned Taiwan against holding today's referendum, but stopped short of spelling out the consequences. The Liberation Army Daily said Pakistan, Brazil and the Czech Republic had issued statements this week warning against the referendum on boosting Taiwan's missile defenses. Overseas Chinese groups also opposed using the referendum to push for independence, the daily said. The People's Daily, the mouthpiece of China's Communist Party, and the official English-language China Daily did not mention the election or the referendum.
■ Politics
Shen gets emotional
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Shen Fu-hsiung (沈富雄) appeared to lose control yesterday in the legislature while he was talking with other DPP lawmakers about his going into hiding earlier this week. He denounced Secretary General of the Presidential Office Chiou I-jen (邱義仁) and DPP campaign spokesperson Wu Nai-jen (吳乃仁) for pres-suring him in the past few days, and he cursed. He said that he had obediently followed instructions from top party officials in the past few days, and that Chiou and Wu had sup-ported his going into hiding. He also said that the points he made in his public state-ments on Thursday were good ones, but that Chiou and Wu had asked him not to deliver the points publicly. He then said Huang Fang-yen (黃芳彥), the party's campaign finance liaison, had told him to go overseas. Shen finished by shouting vulgarities.
■ Diplomacy
Japan urged to help Taiwan
Japan should give deeper thought to its relations with China and should make Taiwan an important strategic partner, a Japanese sociologist has said. Mineo Nakajima, former president of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, was quoted by the Sankei Shimbun daily yesterday as saying that although China has continued to adhere to its "one China" policy, it has not ruled Taiwan for a single day. Nakajima, a well-known political commen-tator, said during a speech on Thursday that Japan and Taiwan are virtually "one body of esprit de corps" and that if Taiwan were annexed by China, it would definitely result in major damage to Japan's interests. Saying that China is not a "trust-worthy" opponent, he said Beijing's increase of its defense budget by 11 percent is worrisome. He called for the government and private sector not to be fooled by China's "false impression of success."
■ Referendum
Doctor urges people to vote
Chang Shang-chwen (張上淳), dean of National Taiwan University Hos-pital's infectious diseases department, issued an
e-mail yesterday urging people to take part in the referendum. Chang became well-known during last year's SARS epidemic. He expressed concern in the e-mail for the nation's future if the referendum were to fail. If not enough people vote, he said, the international community will get the impression that voters are indifferent to China's military threat and don't care about national defense. "China will certainly make this claim. It will be even harder for Taiwan to make its way internationally, and we will be under even greater pressure and subjugation from China," the e-mail stated.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater