■ DIPLOMACY
Ma to revisit allies
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is planning to visit Central America again next month, the Presidential Office said yesterday. A Presidential Office official, who wished to remain anonymous, said that Ma was scheduled to visit Panama, Nicaragua and Honduras with transit stops in San Francisco on his way there and in Hawaii on his return. The main purpose of the trip is to attend the inauguration of Panamanian president-elect Ricardo Martinelli. Ma recently returned from the inauguration of Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes. The trip also took him to Belize and Guatemala. Ma canceled a meeting with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega after Ortega twice postponed the meeting, raising concerns over bilateral ties.
■ POLITICS
Yeh appointed vice minister
Research, Development and Evaluation Commission Deputy Minister Yeh Kuang-shih (葉匡時) will succeed Oliver Yu (游芳來) as vice minister of transportation and communication, the Executive Yuan said yesterday. The change will take effect in the middle of this month. Yu was transferred to replace Wu Min-yu (吳民佑) as chairman of Chunghwa Post on June 1 after Wu retired. The Executive Yuan said that Minister of Transportation and Communications Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國) suggested the replacement and Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) approved it yesterday. Temporarily transferred from the department of business administration at National Sun Yat-sen University, Yeh, a professor of business management, once served as a councilor at the Mainland Affairs Council and a consultant to the Straits Exchange Foundation.
■ DIPLOMACY
DPP protests office closures
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus yesterday criticized the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) for scheduling the closing of five representative offices abroad. “Closing a representative office is a signal of protest against a host country, but MOFA’s closure of overseas representative offices is like a game to them,” DPP caucus whip Lee Chun-yee (李俊毅) told a press conference yesterday, adding that “representative offices are not convenience stores, to open or close as one wishes.” Taiwan’s offices in countries without diplomatic ties with Taiwan indicated they acknowledged Taiwan’s sovereignty, Lee said. The legislator said that MOFA should review why the five offices were inefficient and make improvements rather than close them. Minister of Foreign Affairs Francisco Ou (歐鴻鍊) announced on Friday the government would close five of its 121 representative offices to better utilize resources.
■ SOCIETY
Cold medicine causes crash
A bus driver’s use of cold medicine that made him drowsy was the apparent cause of a bus accident on Sunday night that left two people dead, Taipei Deputy Mayor Wu Ching-chi (吳清基) said yesterday. A breathalyser test found that Chen Chin-fa (陳進發), the driver of Metro Transit Co’s bus No. 270, was not under the influence of alcohol, said Wu as he met the families of the victims. At about 7:45pm on Sunday, the bus, allegedly traveling at high speed and snaking its way down Yanjiuyuan Road Sec 2, hit a woman, Chi Chi-hui (紀季徽), on a bike before ramming into a motorcycle rider, Liu Yueh-e (劉月娥), on the opposite side of the road. Police said Chi died at the scene, while Liu died later in hospital. The bus stopped after crashing into the garage of a private house.
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