DIPLOMACY
New envoy Jakarta-bound
The nation’s new representative to Indonesia, Chang Liang-jen (張良任), is scheduled to leave for Jakarta on Wednesday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. He is filling the vacancy created by the appointment of the former representative, Andrew Hsia (夏立言), to be deputy minister of national defense in October last year. Chang, 67, attended National Chengchi University’s Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies and holds a master’s degree in International Relations from Harvard University, the ministry said. He was sworn in as head of the Taipei Economic and Trade Office in Jakarta last month and will start the job before the Lunar New Year holidays because there are many matters in Indonesia that he has to deal with, the ministry said. Chang has previously served as representative to Hong Kong, deputy minister of the Mainland Affairs Council and deputy defense minister.
CRIME
Nine held for trafficking
Police have cracked a human trafficking ring, rescuing 13 foreign women forced into prostitution, Hsinchu police said on Thursday. Nine suspects were arrested in Hsinchu City and Taoyuan and Yilan counties. The 13 victims were from Indonesia and Vietnam, police said. A Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) and his Vietnamese wife have been named as the suspected masterminds of the operation, which brought Vietnamese and Indonesian women to work in Taiwan by promising them jobs as domestic caregivers. Once in Taiwan, the women were allegedly forced to take drugs and routinely abused, police said. The ring allegedly operated out of a spa and massage parlor in Yilan, which was used as a front to hide the prostitution activities and keep the women captive, police 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
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