■ Society
Prosecutor feels pressure
Prosecutor Chang Hsi-huai (張熙懷) will not attend tomorrow's hearing in the presidential "state affairs fund" case, the Taipei District Prosecutors' Office said yesterday. Chang has been under fire from Democratic Progressive Party legislators over his alleged pro-China sentiment. They have accused him of visiting China, abusing his position by reserving a special seat for a Chinese academic at a hearing in another case and being unqualified to read court evidence about secret diplomatic missions. Staff at Chang's office claimed that accusations have left him depressed. They said he suddenly began shouting on Tuesday evening and that his wife was asked to take him home. The prosecutors office said that Chang would take a few days off, and that after a rest he would attend the trial.
■ Crime
Former minister out on bail
Kuo Yao-chi (郭瑤琪), a former minister of transportation and communications, was released on bail late on Tuesday night after being arrested on suspicion of taking US$20,000 in bribes from businessmen. "Although Kuo denied receiving the money, officials from Nan Ren Hu told prosecutors that they had given Kuo US$20,000 in a package of tea in July," Taipei District Prosecutors' Office spokesman Lin Jinn-tsun (林錦村) said. Lin said Kuo was released on NT$600,000 bail. Nan Ren Hu chairman Lee Ching-po (李清波), a former national policy adviser, told prosecutors that he gave Kuo the money because he and Kuo are friends and Kuo's child was going to the US to attend school. He said the money had nothing to do with the Ministry of Transportation and Communications' tender process for a Taipei Railway Station construction project.
■ Transportation
License plates get new look
New vehicle license plates will no longer show where the plate was issued, eliminating all Chinese characters from the plates, the Directorate General of Highways said yesterday. Currently, the location is printed above the license plate number. Many drivers have questioned the necessity of printing the Chinese characters of the Taiwan Province (台灣省), on the plates since the Taiwan Provincial Government was downsized in 1998. The agency stressed that old license plates do have to be replaced.
■ Cross-strait ties
Ma reiterates `five dos'
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday reiterated his "five dos" for cross-strait policy, promising to make Taiwan a responsible stakeholder in Asia by maintaining stable cross-strait relations. "We will maintain the status quo... we will not seek unification now," Ma told a symposium at National Chengchi University's Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies. The "five dos" are: To resume negotiations based on the so-called "1992 consensus;" to reach a peace accord; to facilitate economic exchanges with the aim of establishing a common market; to work with China to boost Taiwan's presence in international bodies.
■ Transportation
Trucks get tunnel OK
The Directorate General of Highways said yesterday that it would allow large-size trucks weighing 21 tonnes or more to use the Baguashan (八卦山) Tunnel starting next month. The 5km-long tunnel stretches from Changhua County to Nantou County and about 12,000 vehicles use it every day. As of September, 17,029 drivers licensed to operate large-size vehicles had completed training on driving inside long tunnels.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: