POLITICS
Lo to resign office
Presidential Office spokesman Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強) confirmed yesterday that he would resign from his post and devote his efforts to the campaign for President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) re-election. Lo will head the news media, social networking and youth department at Ma’s presidential campaign office. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) spokesman Fan Chiang Tai-chi (范姜泰基) will take over as the Presidential Office spokesman starting today. Lo, one of Ma’s presidential campaign spokesmen during the 2008 presidential campaign, has become a close aide to Ma since he took office. Fan Chiang, who helped Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) win re-election as his campaign spokesman last year, said the new post presented great challenges, but he would make the effort to do his job well.
LAW
Military law revised
Taiwan moved a step closer toward the reduced use of the death penalty yesterday as the Legislative Yuan amended the country’s law on military service violations. The legislature passed the third reading of the bill, which amends the Punishment Act for Violation to the Military Service System (妨害兵役治罪條例) by removing capital punishment as an option in Articles 16 and 17. According to the revised articles, those who carry weapons in a group and seriously hurt a person while trying to obstruct individuals from performing their military service will be subject to a maximum life sentence rather than the death penalty. The amendment was passed to protect human rights in line with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, both signed by Taiwan in 2009, the government said.
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