ESPIONAGE
Spy’s sentence upheld
The Supreme Court upheld a decision on Thursday to sentence a businessman to three-and-a-half years in jail for spying for China. Lo Pin (羅彬) was found guilty by a lower court of being a double agent and of recruiting a military intelligence officer to work for Beijing. According to media reports, the pair provided Beijing with a list of Taiwanese agents working in China. Reports said this led to the unraveling of spy networks in China, although the exact repercussions are unknown. The court said Lo was originally a Taiwanese agent who was turned by the Chinese. It said he had recruited Lo Chi-cheng (羅奇正), no relation, then working for the military intelligence bureau, around 2006 to collect information for China in exchange for money.
ASTRONOMY
Museum to give free shades
The Taipei Astronomical Museum said yesterday it will give away “eclipse glasses” on the following two weekends in the run-up to the transit of Venus in front of the sun on June 6. A limited number of eclipse shades will be given to visitors between 9am and 11am and 1:30pm and 4pm today and tomorrow and on June 2 and 3, the museum said in a statement. The rare astronomical event, last seen in Taiwan in 2004, will not take place again until 2117, the museum added. The transit of Venus, which is like a miniature solar eclipse, occurs when the planet passes between the sun and Earth and can be seen as a black spot moving across the face of the sun, the museum said. Starting at 6:11am, the full transit of Venus is expected to last six hours and 36 minutes and will be visible in Taiwan, eastern China, eastern Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.
CRIME
Phone fraud ring busted
Another Taiwanese-led telephone fraud ring that operated mainly overseas and targeted mainland Chinese has been broken up through cross-border police cooperation, leading to the arrest of 484 suspects in various countries, police said yesterday. The suspects, who include 300 Taiwanese and 165 Chinese, were captured in Taiwan, China, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Fiji, according to Lin Yuan-cheng (林淵城), acting captain of the second investigation brigade of the Criminal Investigation Bureau. Lin said the bureau launched an investigation into the case late last year after being notified by Chinese police that a woman had been defrauded out of 12 million Chinese yuan (US$1.89 million) in November last year. Police found the criminal ring was very well organized and large, with bases in different countries across Asia, he said, adding that the ring members posed as police, prosecutors and bank staff to swindle money out of their victims.
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