■ POLITICS
PRC tells US to drop sale
China’s defense minister yesterday called on the US to drop a planned weapons sale to Taiwan, saying it threatened China-US defense cooperation, state media reported. Chinese Defense Minister Liang Guanglie (梁光烈) also called on Washington to cease all military ties with Taiwan, during a meeting in Beijing with the visiting former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, Xinhua news agency said. “The US arms sale to Taiwan has poisoned the sound atmosphere of bilateral military relations and endangered China’s national security,” Liang was quoted as telling Myers. The Pentagon notified Congress in October that it planned to sell US$6.5 billion in military hardware to Taiwan. The sale was expected to include advanced interceptor missiles, Apache attack helicopters and submarine-launched missiles. The US Defense Department has said the proposed sale was aimed at improving Taiwan’s defenses and would not alter the basic military balance in the region.
■ EARTHQUAKES
Tremor jolts nation
A 6.0-magnitude earthquake jolted the nation yesterday, but there were no immediate reports of damage, casualties or tsunamis, seismologists said. The undersea tremor struck at 5:18am about 54km east of Hualien at a depth of 35km, it said. The US Geological Survey put the magnitude of the quake at 5.3.
■ CRIME
Ex-KMT legislator indicted
The Kinmen Prosecutor’s Office last night indicted former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Wu Cherng-dean (吳成典), his wife and one of his staffers for allegedly embezzling NT$6 million (US$178,700) during Wu’s two legislative terms. Prosecutors sought a 15-year prison sentence for Wu. They received a tip-off earlier this year that Wu had allegedly embezzled payments reserved for legislative aides between 2002 and earlier this year. Prosecutors said Wu’s wife, Deng Yen-hsi (鄧琰係) and the director of Wu’s Kinmen office, Hsu Li-hung (許勵宏), helped embezzle the money even though they knew it was from public funds. Wu last night protested his innocence and said he would appeal.
■ POLITICS
Diane Lee still denies claim
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Diane Lee (李慶安) yesterday continued to defend herself against Democratic Progressive Party speculation that she has US citizenship. Lee reiterated her claim that she automatically lost her US citizenship when she began serving as a public official in Taiwan in 1994. Lee presented a document she said she had obtained from US State Department official Edward Betancourt last Thursday, saying that the department had not and would not discuss the results of its investigation into her US citizenship status until the probe had been concluded. Lee held the press conference after Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrew Hsia (夏立言) told the legislature’s Foreign and National Defense Committee meeting yesterday morning that the ministry had received a response from the American Institute in Taiwan’s Washington headquarters regarding the legislature’s inquiry about the nationality status of all of the nation’s lawmakers. Hsia said the ministry would send the response to the legislature directly since the legislature’s inquiry was labeled as confidential.
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