■ Civil Rights
Su defends toy gun ban
Banning toy guns does not infringe upon civil rights, Minister of the Interior Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) said yesterday. Defending a revision of the firearms control statute introduced by the Ministry of the Interior during a hearing at the Legislative Yuan, Su said tightening control over toy guns or imitation firearms that could be mistaken for real weapons was a positive move to prevent crime rather than one that violated people's rights. Some legislators disagreed, however, saying that the idea of restricting toy guns deserved further investigation. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Apollo Chen (陳學聖) said it was hard to define the "realness" of imitation guns and that sweeping restrictions might cause undesirable jitters. It would put people's rights at stake if a realistic toy gun without assault capability was made illegal, Chen said.
■ Diplomacy
China mending relations
Singapore and China appear to have started repairing their bruised diplomatic relationship -- strained by a trip to Taipei -- as Beijing's ambassador attended Thursday's inauguration of the new prime minister. Ties were strained after Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍), who was sworn in on Thursday, made a brief trip last month to Taiwan. Despite the political storm that followed, Ambassador Zhang Yun (張雲) was among the 1,400-strong audience that witnessed Lee's inauguration, an official from the Chinese embassy said yesterday. "It is a protocol matter," the official said. "If you didn't attend it wouldn't be polite." China has repeatedly said Lee's Taipei trip would cause "severe consequences" to relations between Singapore and China.
■ Transportation
TRA unhappy with suppliers
The Taiwan Railway Administration (TRA) said yesterday that it had asked the Ministry of Economic Affairs to "blacklist" three overseas companies who sold 400 train carriages of allegedly poor quality to it eight years ago. Faced with widespread complaints from passengers, the TRA promised to fix faulty air conditioning and lighting systems by the end of October. The three manufacturers named by the TRA include Hyundai Precision & Industry from South Korea, GEC Alstom from France and Union Carriage & Wagon from South Africa. A local Chinese-language newspaper reported that a letter of credit issued to the joint consortium was two years overdue and that the TRA therefore had no legal means to ask for compensation.
■ Crime
Former executive sued
The Taiwan arm of Dow Chemicals has sued a former executive for allegedly stealing confidential company data, the Chinese-language media reported yesterday. Tu Chung-hsien (杜宗憲), a former Dow Chemicals general manager who resigned in late June, was suspected of downloading more than 280,000 entries of high-tech information from the company's central database, the China Times reported. The database was estimated to be worth more than NT$20 billion (US$586 million), it said. Dow Chemicals, the world's fifth-largest chemicals company, confirmed it was investigating an alleged breach of intellectual property rights but denied media reports that the theft was worth NT$20 billion.
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
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
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