■ TRANSPORTATION
Pirate attack suspected
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said yesterday evening that a Kaohsiung-registered fishing boat, the MV Win Far 101, was believed to have been hijacked by pirates approximately 1,000km off the coast of Africa. MOFA Spokesman Henry Chen (陳銘政) said the boat had a crew of 30. Only the captain and second captain were Taiwanese, while the crew were from Indonesia, China and the Philippines. A wire report said a British cargo ship had been hijacked along with the Taiwanese boat near the Seychelles. The Fisheries Agency has contacted its British counterpart and the US naval authority stationed in the region for assistance, Chen said.
■ POLITICS
ARATS official arrives
Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) Deputy Director An Min (安民) arrived yesterday for a seven-day visit. An said his trip was a business inspection and not related to the forthcoming meeting between Straits Exchange Foundation Chairman Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤) and ARATS Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林). The meeting is scheduled for next month or June. Chiang, who spoke at a dinner he hosted for An yesterday evening, said the government’s policy was to tackle easier and more urgent issues first and steadily move toward more difficult and less pressing ones. Economic issues precede political ones, he said.
■ POLITICS
Chiu accuses Ker of crime
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chiu Yi (邱毅) yesterday accused Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) of involvement in illegal stock trading. Stock investor Chang Shih-chieh (張世傑), who finished a prison term in February, recently published an autobiography in which he says he conspired with a number of legislators and hosts of stock market investment programs to manipulate the stock market. He said one of the legislators was a senior DPP legislator who visited him while in detention and asked him to shoulder responsibility for the illegal trading. Chiu said yesterday Chang was referring to Ker, who had close relations with Chang. Ker yesterday rebutted the claim. Chang, along with KMT Legislator Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁), was indicted in 2005 for violating the Securities Transaction Law (證券交易法) and for breach of trust in relation to illegal trading of Hold-Key Wire & Cable Cooperation (合機電線電纜公司) shares.
■ ECONOMY
Kaoliang vouchers issued
The Kinmen County Government said it would present every Kinmen resident with NT$10,800 in gift vouchers this year for purchasing the island chain’s most famous product, kaoliang. A first batch of gift vouchers was distributed to the county’s 85,143 residents at 45 locations in six townships on Sunday, with each resident receiving NT$3,600 in vouchers. The residents have until June 5 to spend the vouchers in exchange for kaoliang from a local distillery. The county government said it would do the same twice more to coincide with the Dragon Boat Festival on May 28 and the Mid-Autumn Festival on Oct. 3. The vouchers are being handed out to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Kuningtou in Kinmen in late October 1949, officials said. During that battle, troops in Kinmen defeated 19,000 invading Chinese troops, killing 3,873 and capturing 5,175 others. The Kinmen garrison troops lost 1,267 casualties.
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