■JUSTICE
Yunlin prosecutor impeached
The Control Yuan yesterday impeached Yunlin district prosecutor Liao Chun-chien (廖椿堅) on a charge of abusing his powers when he worked in the Tainan Branch of the Taiwan High Prosecutor’s Office. The Control Yuan said in a statement that Liao, who has been suspended, had let five containers of smuggled firearms pass through customs during an investigation into a contraband firearms case in 2000. The whereabouts of four of the five containers are still unknown. The Control Yuan also charged Liao with helping an informer who had been prohibited from leaving the country to flee with a forged passport, it said. Liao was sentenced to eight years in prison and stripped of his political rights for three years after being found guilty in his second trial. The Control Yuan said eight prosecutors, two judges, a Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau officer and two police officers have been impeached since August.
■HEALTH
Ministry tackles WHA bid
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has completed a multilingual position paper to seek global support for Taiwan’s bid to gain observer status in the World Health Assembly (WHA), the WHO’s decision-making body. The ministry said it was presenting its position paper in Chinese, English, Spanish and French to explain to the international community the importance of Taiwan joining the WHA. In the paper, the ministry says that Taiwan was pleased to be included in the International Health Regulations (IHR) in January, but that this was not enough because the IHR mechanism is limited to the monitoring and control of infectious diseases. Only by taking part in WHO-led exchanges and activities could Taiwan fully engage with other member states to provide or obtain the latest technology and information relating to health issues, the ministry said.
■SPORTS
Lawmakers want athletes
Lawmakers have urged the government to amend the law to lure foreign athletes by granting them Taiwanese citizenship while allowing them to keep their own nationality, media reports said yesterday. The Central News Agency (CNA) said 17 lawmakers submitted the proposal to attract foreign athletes who could win medals for Taiwan. The legislature will debate the proposal on Thursday, CNA said. Foreigners presently must renounce their nationality upon obtaining Taiwanese citizenship. The 17 lawmakers are asking the government to amend the nationality act and allow foreign athletes to choose if they want to renounce their nationality. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chao Li-yun (趙麗雲) warned against recruiting foreign athletes carelessly, saying athletes had relatively short sporting careers and in certain sports had to wait for several years before representing an adopted country in international competition. “The sporting life for a gymnast ends at age 18, but for a ballgame athlete, it could be 30. So when we amend the law, we must be careful to get a return on our investment,” CNA quoted her as saying.
■ CULTURE
Coffee exhibition planned
The National Museum of History in Taipei has scheduled an exhibition for next month on the nation’s coffee culture. The exhibition, titled “Early Taiwanese Coffee Culture,” will run from May 27 to June 14 and will be open from 10am to 6pm every day except Mondays, the museum said in a press release yesterday.
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
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:
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
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