HISTORY
Chiang documents released
More than 263,000 declassified documents pertaining to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) are now available online, Academia Historica said yesterday. The files are accessible on the institution’s archive (ahonline.drnh.gov.tw), it said in a statement. The files, 61.65 percent of which were formerly listed as confidential, were uploaded to the archive in several batches between January and last month after being individually reviewed between August and December last year. They represent 98.8 percent of all existing documents related to Chiang, the institute said. The remainder not yet online includes some that cannot be posted due to copyright restrictions (0.74 percent) and some that are restricted due to privacy concerns (0.44 percent), while the rest (0.02 percent) must remain permanently confidential to protect intelligence sources, it said.
NATIONAL DEFENSE
Frigates arriving soon
Two Perry-class guided missile frigates purchased from the US are expected to arrive in Kaohsiung on Saturday and be commissioned into service next year, military sources said yesterday. The two frigates, built in the 1980s, were formally transferred to the Republic of China Navy at a ceremony on March 9 in South Carolina. Scheduled to arrive at Zuoying Military Harbor, they are to join the navy’s 146th fleet, which is based on Penghu and is responsible for patrolling the Taiwan Strait, the sources said. Weapons system testing and personnel training will be conducted before the two frigates are formally commissioned into service, the navy has said, adding that a commissioning ceremony has been scheduled for July next year.
CRIME
Illegal job brokers arrested
An Indonesian woman and 19 others were arrested on Monday in New Taipei City on suspicion of illegally brokering jobs for illegal workers and remitting funds overseas. National Immigration Agency officials said the woman, who runs a store specializing in products from Indonesia, was suspected of sending Indonesians who had overstayed their visas to work in hospitals as nurses and cleaners. Some of them also work in the woman’s restaurant or as prostitutes, according to officials with an agency task force investigating a human trafficking ring suspected of using drugs to control Indonesian sex workers. The woman and her brother, both surnamed Wang (王), were among eight people arrested in connection with the task force’s investigation. After searching several locations, the task force also arrested 11 illegal workers and another foreign national whose visa had expired, the officials said. They said the Indonesian store remits an average of NT$100,000 (US$3,305) to Indonesia per day, or about NT$36.5 million a year.
TOURISM
Cross-strait Kinmen walk set
A cross-strait walk will be held in Kinmen on Saturday as part of efforts to promote tourism in the outlying island group, the county government said yesterday. Five hundred Chinese visitors from Xiamen and 200 Kinmen residents are expected to take part in the 6km walk, the Kinmen Association of Travel Agents said. The walk will start at Zhaishan Tunnel (翟山坑道) at 1pm and take the participants to a number of attractions before returning to the tunnel, the Kinmen Tourism Department said. The event has been organized by the department, Xiamen’s Tourism Development Commission and travel agents from the two sides.
NATIONAL SECURITY
Detention extended
A Chinese man accused of espionage is to be detained for another two months while prosecutors continue their investigation, the Taipei District Court ruled on Monday. The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office asked for more time, saying that 29-year-old Zhou Hongxu (周泓旭) was likely to flee the country or collude to destroy evidence. Zhou, from Liaoning Province, was enrolled in an MBA program at National Chengchi University in Taipei from 2012 until last year. He returned to Taiwan in February to work as a management investor. He was detained on March 10 for allegedly trying to gather classified information from schools and government offices. Investigators said that Zhou was allegedly in contact with a Ministry of Foreign Affairs official, whom he had met when a student, and was trying to persuade the official to hand over classified information in exchange for free trips abroad. Zhou has denied the accusations.
TRANSPORTATION
Review of big bike access
Deputy Minister of Transportation and Communications Wang Kwo-tsai (王國材) said a meeting is scheduled for Friday to discuss changing regulations to allow large motorcycles on freeways. Experts, local government officials and bikers’ rights advocates have been invited. At present, large motorcycles — those with an engine of 550cc or larger — are only allowed on a 5.6km spur of the Chiang Wei-shui Freeway (National Freeway No. 3), which connects Taipei and New Taipei City’s Shenkeng District (深坑), on a trial basis. However, surveillance footage has shown that many of the bikers who have used the spur swerved in and out of traffic, as many people expected, Wang said. It is such behavior that has led to restrictions on big bikes on freeways, Wang added.
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