■ CRIME
Tax agency official indicted
District prosecutors indicted a Taipei National Tax Administration employee for influence peddling yesterday. Prosecutors said Yang Ju-hsin (楊儒昕) demanded a bribe from famed Chinese medicine doctor Wu Ming-chu (吳明珠) in return for not reporting her for tax evasion. They said that after Yang noticed in February that Wu’s clinic had a large number of patients and high revenue, he demanded a NT$1.5 million (US$50,000) bribe. Although Wu insisted she was not trying to evade taxes, she asked her husband to negotiate with Yang. The two men reportedly agreed on a payment of NT$1 million, but Yang’s husband recorded the discussions and submitted them to investigators as well as informing the tax agency. Yang reportedly told Wu’s husband to bring the money to a local near the tax administration building in Taipei on June 25. Investigation Bureau officers arrested Yang and confiscated the NT$1 million during the handover.
■ JAPAN
Aborigines protest in Tokyo
Independent Legislator May Chin (高金素梅) led a group of Aborigines in a surprise demonstration at the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo yesterday in a bid to get the Japanese government to remove the names of Aborigines forced to fight in the Imperial Army during World War II from the shrine, which honors Japan’s war dead. The group headed for the main hall as soon as they arrived at 9:30am, chanting slogans and carring banners demanding that Japan “give us back our ancestors’ spirits.” Despite efforts by security guards to block the protesters and seize their banners, the group managed to reach the square in front of the main hall. Chin demanded that the Japanese government apologize and make reparations for Japan’s war atrocities.
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