CRIME
Couple allegedly starve baby
A young couple have been accused of letting their baby girl starve to death because they were obsessed with playing online games and forgot to feed her regularly, police said yesterday. The one-year-old weighed only 4kg, or half the average size for a girl her age, when the couple reported her death earlier this week, the police said. Media reported that police found the toddler reduced to “just skin and bone and with sunken eyes,” while a gaming Web site was flickering on the computer monitor next to her crib. Prosecutors will look into the cause of the girl’s death and determine whether her parents, in their early 20s, were responsible. They face up to two years in prison for manslaughter if convicted.
CULTURE
Flora expo attendance up
Attendance at the Taipei International Flora Expo broke the 5 million mark yesterday, thanks largely to this month’s warmer weather, an expo spokesperson said. A lucky draw was held yesterday to celebrate hitting the attendance milestone. Prizes included an electric scooter, electric bicycle, airline tickets and hotel coupons. An expo spokesperson said more than 7.02 million tickets have been sold so far, generating NT$1.09 billion (US$36.6 million) in revenue. The expo closes on April 25, so expo officials are urging people not to wait if they intend to visit.
GOVERNMENT
Few women advance
Women might account for 38.77 percent of the nation’s civil service, but they occupy just 25.44 percent of senior rankings in the system, according to the Ministry of Civil Service’s latest statistics. It said the disproportionately low number of woman in senior posts could be attributed to two factors: They tend to join the government later than men and more leave after getting married or having children. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 340,106 civil servants. If military, education and other government employees were included, the total number of people on the government payroll would be 835,219.
For fiscal year 2009, local taxpayers spent a total of NT$1.1 trillion on civil service salaries and other benefits, the ministry said. The 6,572 Aborigines accounted for 1.92 percent of employees, while the 4,945 disabled civil servants accounted for 1.9 percent of all government jobs.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift