■ POLITICS
New party to hold meeting
The newly established Taiwan Farmers Party will hold a commissioners meeting next Thursday to hammer out strategies to boost the party's development and recruit more members, party sources said. The party, headquartered in Kaohsiung County, formed a 23-member Development Commission at its inaugural meeting on Friday. During the commission's first meeting, a liaison officer will be selected to represent the party in engagements with other political parties and government authorities, the sources said. The party, which has vowed to fight for farmers and fishermen's rights and interests, seeks to establish effective tactics and strategies to win at least 5 percent of the vote in the upcoming legislative elections in order to secure two to three at-large legislative seats, the sources said.
■ TRADE
Australia to import mangoes
The Australian government has agreed to import mangoes from Taiwan, in a major breakthrough in bilateral trade relations, officials of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Australia announced on Monday. The breakthrough is the result of a three-year effort to persuade the Australian government to import the Taiwanese fruit, the officials said. The announcement came after Australian quarantine officials came to Taiwan to inspect mango farms and other related facilities at the end of last month, officials said. Mangoes are a tropical fruit in season during the summer. Therefore, during the southern hemisphere winter, Australian consumers will be able to enjoy imported Taiwanese mangoes, the officials said.
■ SOCIETY
Pendants endanger kids
Doctors are warning parents not to let their infants wear pendants, necklaces or pacifiers attached to strings around their necks after a Taiwanese girl was strangled to death by the string of her pendant. The incident occurred in Hsinchu County on April 19. The girl died on Monday after lying in a coma for two months, the Chinese-language Apple Daily and the United Daily News reported. The two dailies said the parents of the one-year-old girl had gotten a longevity pendant from a temple and tied it around the girl's neck with a string. On April 19, the girl was playing in a baby's bed with her two-year-old sister when the string of her pendant got caught on an iron bar of the baby bed, strangling her. When the mother, surnamed Lee, realized something was wrong, she rushed into the room, but her daughter was already unconscious. The girl's mother, 28, was charged with homicide, which carries a maximum two-year jail term.
■ ENVIRONMENT
Bureau urges cuts
The Environmental Protection Bureau of the Taipei City Government is urging business and the public to cooperate in a drive that will start on July 1 to wipe out over-packaging and reduce waste. According to bureau officials, during a random inspection of food gift boxes last month, four out of 10 gift boxes were over-packaged. Most of the over-packaged items were chicken essence products. Since July last year, the Environmental Protection Administration has implemented increasingly strict regulations targeting over-packaged gift boxes containing cakes, cosmetics, liquor, computer software and video games, bureau officials said.
‘HUMILIATING’: Aletheia University students called on the school to apologize for limiting former professor Chang Liang-tse’s access to its Taiwan literature archive The Aletheia University Student Association yesterday called on the university to apologize to retired professor Chang Liang-tse (張良澤) after it prevented him from accessing the Taiwanese literature archive at its Tainan campus by changing the lock on the building. Last month, the university changed the lock on the building without warning, barring Chang’s access to the archive that he had “singlehandedly established,” Chung Yen-wei (鍾延威), the son of the late writer Chung Chao-cheng (鍾肇政), wrote on Facebook on Friday. The university in 1997 created the first department of Taiwanese literature in the nation, and Chang, now 82, was the department’s first-ever chairman,
ALLEVIATING FEARS: The CECC would only announce public places where it is difficult to identify everyone there at the same time as the couple, minister Chen said The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) yesterday announced six places where two locally infected COVID-19 cases had visited between Thursday last week and Sunday, urging people who had been at the places at the same time to monitor their health. The couple, cases 838, a doctor, and 839, his nurse girlfriend, were reported by the center on Tuesday. The doctor had treated a patient with COVID-19 last week before he began suffering symptoms on Friday, while the nurse began suffering symptoms on Saturday. They work in the same hospital in northern Taiwan, but the nurse had not worked with COVID-19 patients, so
SECOND RULING: Israeli-American Oren Shlomo Mayer refused to sign a court transcript, complained about the court translator and said the trial had been unfair The High Court yesterday upheld New Taipei City District Court’s verdicts on four men convicted last year in connection with the 2018 murder and dismemberment of a Canadian citizen on the banks of the Sindian River (新店溪). It found American-Israeli Oren Shlomo Mayer and American Ewart Odane Bent guilty of homicide and the abandonment and destruction of a corpse, with Mayer sentenced to life in prison and Bent given a term of 12 years and six months, for the death of Sanjay Ryan Ramgahan, whose body parts were found in a riverside park under Zhongzheng Bridge in New Taipei’s Yonghe
A lawyer and a prosecutor yesterday castigated what they called a lenient ruling by the High Court on Luo Wen-shan (羅文山), whose prison sentence was reduced to two years, which he does not need to serve, after he was convicted for receiving illegal political donations from China to meddle in Taiwan’s elections. Investigators found that Luo, who retired from the army with the rank of lieutenant general, had accepted NT$8.38 million (US$294,604 at the current exchange rate) under the guise of political contributions from Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference member Xu Zhiming (許智明) and people in Hong Kong from 2008 to
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