CRIME
Broker given more years
A diplomatic broker from Singapore who is currently serving a jail term in Taiwan in connection with the embezzlement of US$30 million in Taiwanese diplomatic funds was given another three years and four months in prison yesterday on charges of breach of trust. Taipei District Court judges said Wu Shih-tsai (吳思材) and his partner, Ching Chi-ju (金紀玖), a Taiwanese national with a US passport, were commissioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2006, which wired money into a joint bank account held by Wu and Ching in September 2006, to help facilitate a deal to establish diplomatic ties with Papua New Guinea. The alleged diplomatic bid failed, but the duo did not return the funds to the ministry, which only later found out that the money had been completely withdrawn from the designated account.
POLITICS
Ma chooses Vatican envoy
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has designated Minister of the Interior Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) as his special envoy to attend the beatification ceremony for former pope John Paul II, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday. The Vatican has announced that Pope Benedict XVI will lead the beatification, a miracle attributed to pope John Paul II’s intercession on Sunday. The delegation led by Jiang and his wife Lee Shu-jen (李淑珍) was joined by James Lee (李光章), director-general of the ministry’s Department of Foreign Affairs. They left last night and will return to Taiwan on Wednesday. The ministry said the designation showed that Taiwan holds the former pope in high esteem and cherishes its relationships with the Holy See.
DIPLOMACY
Official criticizes diplomat
Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Shen Lyu-shun (沈呂巡) yesterday said Representative to Italy William Yih (易榮宗) “set a bad example” for the nation’s diplomats by refusing a transfer to Ecuador. Yih has instead applied for early retirement. Shen dismissed Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tsai Huang-liang’s (蔡煌瑯) accusation at the legislature’s Foreign and National Defense Committee that the transfer was the result of a power struggle between the ministry and the Government Information Office, with which Yih was affiliated. Like servicemen, diplomats have no right to choose which battlefield they are sent to, said Shen, adding that the transfer was no different from general practice. Transferring Yih to Ecuador was tantamount to forcing him to leave the ministry because Yih does not speak Spanish, Tsai said.
ENVIRONMENT
Bureau says expect dry spell
People should be prepared for an extended dry spell even though the plum rain season is about to begin, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday. The bureau said that although an approaching cold front could bring rain nationwide at the beginning of next month, a dry spell should be expected in the following weeks. According to bureau data, only 11.2mm of rainfall was recorded in Yilan County between April 1 and Tuesday — the lowest volume recorded for that period since 1935. Another record was broken in Wuci (梧棲), central Taiwan, where the total rainfall for the period was 0.1mm, the lowest volume since 1976 when a rainfall monitoring station was set up there, the bureau said. In Hsinchu on the west coast, 18.6mm of rainfall was recorded in the first 26 days of this month, which was the third-lowest volume recorded since the collection of such data began.
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