■ BUSINESS
Company paid president
A Taiwanese company in 1999 paid then-Panamanian president Miguel Angel Rodriguez US$1.4 million to establish a foothold in the country, a witness said on Monday in the corruption trial of the former leader. Rafael Sequiera Garza, who managed several of Rodriguez’s companies when he was president (from 1998 to 2003), said the money was deposited in a Panamanian bank account of one of those firms, Inversiones Denisse. He said the payment came from Taiwan’s Friendship Company, adding that the US$1.4 million was used to develop company projects in Costa Rica. Sequiera said the money was administered personally by Rodriguez.
■ POLITICS
Chen-era official acquitted
Former Ministry of National Defense deputy minister Ko Cheng-heng (柯承亨) was acquitted yesterday by the Taiwan High Court on a charge of leaking confidential information to then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) during a criminal investigation concerning Chen. Yesterday’s ruling was a final verdict. Prosecutors said when they investigated Chen’s “state affairs” fund case in 2006, they requested the ministry to offer confidential information about Chen’s usage of a secret diplomatic fund. Prosecutors suspected Ko of making a copy of a document obtained by his secretary from the prosecutors’office and handing it to Chen. Ko denied he made a copy and leaked it to Chen, saying the particular document went through different hands in the ministry as there was more than one person working on it at the time. The Taipei District Court said there was no way to ascertain whom may have given a copy to Chen.
■ SPORT
Olympian wants to see father
Youth Olympics silver medalist Kuo Hsing-chun (郭婞淳), who has professed a desire to meet her birth father, was supported by her mother yesterday, who said she respects her daughter’s wish to meet her father. Kuo, who took silver in the women’s 53kg weightlifting division at the games in Singapore with a total score of 174kg, said upon receiving her medal that she hoped to share her glory with her father — who she has never met. Kuo appealed to the Taiwanese public to help her find her father. Kuo’s mother said that Kuo’s father abandoned them when her daughter was only a few months old and that even when she took Hsing-chun back to her father’s maternal home as an infant, he did not visit.
■ SOCIETY
Survivors to be housed
More than 100 permanent houses are expected to be completed by the end of May next year in Kaohsiung County’s Jiasian Township (甲仙) for mudslide-battered Siaolin Village (小林) survivors, who were displaced by Typhoon Morakot in August last year, the county government said yesterday. The Planning Office of the Kaohsiung County Government said construction on a 5-hectare site dubbed “Second Siaolin Village” is scheduled to start on Nov. 15, after confirmation of a donation from the Red Cross Society of the Republic of China. President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), during a visit to the surviving villagers on Aug. 8 — the first anniversary of the disaster — expressed hope that all Morakot victims would be resettled before next Lunar New Year in February. The county government yesterday said that 145 households from Siaolin Village have applied to move to the planned village, with 106 applications already approved.
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