■ Crime
Yunlin speaker free on bail
Yunlin County Council Speaker Chen Ching-hsiu (陳清秀) was released on NT$600,000 bail and banned from travelling outside the country early yesterday morning. Chen was trans-ferred to the Yunlin District Prosecutors Office for interrogation after prose-cutors raided his residence on Thursday. He allegedly helped legislative candidate Chang Sho-wen (張碩文) by treating nearly 200 voters and supporters to a free dinner party on Nov. 5. Yunlin Chief Prosecutor Lin Chih-feng (林志峰) sum-moned 13 witnesses in the case but none of them was detained after questioning.
■ Crime
Prosecutors probe anchor
The Taipei District Prose-cutors Office yesterday said that TV anchor Chen Sheng-hung (陳勝鴻) may have violated privacy regulations. A woman who identified herself as Chen's former girlfriend has complained that Chen videotaped their intimate encounters without her consent. Taipei District Prosecutors Office Spokes-man Lin Bang-liang (林邦樑) said prosecutors have begun an investigation. Lin said the prosecutors will ask the woman to provide the video footage. She said she acci-dentally discovered the video footage and is worried that the tape will be made public someday now that she and Chen are no longer a couple.
■ Aviation
Seoul routes allocated
The Civil Aeronautics Administration allocated Taiwan-South Korea pas-senger services between six airlines yesterday. The Taipei-Seoul route was assigned to China Airlines and EVA Airways and the Kaohsiung-Seoul line was given to UNI Airways and Mandarin Airlines. Far East Air Transport and TransAsia Airways got the Taipei-Jeju route while the Taipei-Busan line went to TransAsia Airways and UNI Airways. The airlines must file an application for an air-route certificate within a month and launch services within four months of the certifi-cate being issued.
■ Entertainment
CBS program lauded
A radio program produced by the Central Broadcasting System (CBS) has been rated as one of the top 10 English-language radio programs in the world for a second time by Passport to World Band Radio, an international short-wave-broadcasting maga-zine. "The Beauty of Tradi-tional Chinese Music," a program to introduce traditional Chinese music, was rated as a top 10 English-language radio show this year by the magazine. CBS chairman Lin Feng-cheng (林峰正) said the station will continue to produce quality programs. The program was named as a top 10 show in 2001.
■ Diplomacy
European Parliament hailed
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday welcomed a decision by the European Parliament to maintain its arms sales embargo against China. Ministry spokesman Michel Lu (呂慶龍) was referring to a vote by the parliament on Wednesday to continue the ban on arms sales to Beijing which was imposed shortly after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Lu said the decision shows that the EU still thinks that China has not done enough to improve its protection of human rights. The parliament said the arms embargo should continue until the EU has adopted a code of conduct providing legal restraints on arms exports, and until China takes concrete measures to improve its human rights situation.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
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