■ POLITICS
Chen, Wu miss court date
Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and his wife, Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍), did not show up for a hearing yesterday in which the pair were summoned as witnesses. The Taiwan High Court asked the pair to testify in a slander case that Chen filed against Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chiu Yi (邱毅). The high court said yesterday it would summon the pair again. In February 2000, Chiu, a campaign spokesman for independent presidential candidate James Soong (宋楚瑜), accused Wu of possessing NT$75 million (US$2.4 million) in investments and linked her fortune to a stock market speculator nicknamed “Ah Ting” (阿丁). Chen’s camp denied the charges and accused Chiu of violating the Election and Recall Law.
■ POLITICS
Premier to give report
Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) will deliver his first administrative report at the Legislative Yuan on Friday and Tuesday next week, a statement issued by the legislature said yesterday. The legislature’s Procedure Committee completed the agenda yesterday for the plenary sessions on the same days and invited Liu to deliver his report and answer questions from lawmakers. The committee also included an amendment to a law governing the behavior of legislators. Proposed by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wong Chin-chu (翁金珠), the measure would specify how lawmakers who hold foreign citizenship would be disciplined. If the amendment passes, violators will be removed from office and have to return all earnings received while in office.
■ DIPLOMACY
MOFA names new staff
Sun Ta-cheng (孫大成), head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ (MOFA) Central Taiwan Office, has been named the new ambassador to Guatemala in the first wave of diplomatic personnel reshuffles under new Minister of Foreign Affairs Francisco Ou (歐鴻鍊), the ministry announced yesterday. Ou served as the representative to Guatemala before being appointed head of the ministry earlier this month. Sun was a deputy division chief and then division chief in Taiwan’s representative office in the US before taking over as director of MOFA’s Department of General Affairs. Sun was Taiwan’s ambassador to the Dominican Republic and then top representative to Chile before he was appointed to head the Central Taiwan Office in January. Meanwhile, Wu Chien-kuo (吳建國), a former deputy representative to Thailand, has been named the new deputy director of the ministry’s NGO Affairs Committee, replacing Vanessa Shih (史亞平), who was appointed Government Information Office head.
■ POLITICS
Chen weighs in on secrets
Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) yesterday said that whether President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) could declassify the documents relating to his controversial “state affairs fund” and listed by him as confidential was a constitutional issue. Chen issued a statement saying that he identified those documents as classified during his presidency and the courts and prosecutors have asked Ma to declassify them. However, whether the Presidential Office or prosecutors have the right to challenge the presidential authority is a dilemma, Chen said, and it is a constitutional issue whether the new president has the right to declassify documents listed as confidential by previous presidents. Chen said it would be an overt violation of the principle of separation of powers if the judiciary intervened in presidential authority.
■ SOCIETY
Man joins girlfriend in freezer
A man grieving over the death of his girlfriend climbed inside a morgue freezer to be with her and was pulled out alive half an hour later, media and an official said yesterday. The 41-year-old man was discovered on Monday when workers detected an unusually high temperature in the freezer and realized the hatch was not securely fastened. “A morgue manager opened the hatch, saw two people lying inside, felt scared enough to yell out and then even cried,” the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) reported. “She didn’t calm down for a long time.” The man took a drug before entering the freezer to speed what appeared to be a suicide attempt, local papers said. They said his girlfriend had died on Friday from an overdose of sleeping pills. The morgue would step up security to ensure that family and others who come by to identify bodies do not stay too long, morgue administrator Cheng Ching-yuan (鄭景源) said.
■ HISTORY
Stamps, sheet to be issued
Taiwan Post is set to issue a set of two stamps and a souvenir sheet on Friday to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the National Taiwan Museum. The set includes an NT$5 stamp featuring the Yellow Tiger Flag of Democratic Taiwan and a NT$25 stamp featuring a portrait of Koxinga (1368-1644), the famous Ming general who drove the Dutch out of Taiwan. The background of the Koxinga stamp features part of a map of Taiwan dating from the Emperor Kangxi’s reign during the Qing Dynasty. The souvenir sheet’s background includes the same map as well as a picture of the museum in the upper left corner and the museum’s centenary logo in the upper right corner.
Taiwan yesterday condemned the recent increase in Chinese coast guard-escorted fishing vessels operating illegally in waters around the Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島) in the South China Sea. Unusually large groupings of Chinese fishing vessels began to appear around the islands on Feb. 15, when at least six motherships and 29 smaller boats were sighted, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said in a news release. While CGA vessels were dispatched to expel the Chinese boats, Chinese coast guard ships trespassed into Taiwan’s restricted waters and unsuccessfully attempted to interfere, the CGA said. Due to the provocation, the CGA initiated an operation to increase
A crowd of over 200 people gathered outside the Taipei District Court as two sisters indicted for abusing a 1-year-old boy to death attended a preliminary hearing in the case yesterday afternoon. The crowd held up signs and chanted slogans calling for aggravated penalties in child abuse cases and asking for no bail and “capital punishment.” They also held white flowers in memory of the boy, nicknamed Kai Kai (剴剴), who was allegedly tortured to death by the sisters in December 2023. The boy died four months after being placed in full-time foster care with the
CHANGING LANDSCAPE: Many of the part-time programs for educators were no longer needed, as many teachers obtain a graduate degree before joining the workforce, experts said Taiwanese universities this year canceled 86 programs, Ministry of Education data showed, with educators attributing the closures to the nation’s low birthrate as well as shifting trends. Fifty-three of the shuttered programs were part-time postgraduate degree programs, about 62 percent of the total, the most in the past five years, the data showed. National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) discontinued the most part-time master’s programs, at 16: chemistry, life science, earth science, physics, fine arts, music, special education, health promotion and health education, educational psychology and counseling, education, design, Chinese as a second language, library and information sciences, mechatronics engineering, history, physical education
The Shanlan Express (山嵐號), or “Mountain Mist Express,” is scheduled to launch on April 19 as part of the centennial celebration of the inauguration of the Taitung Line. The tourism express train was renovated from the Taiwan Railway Corp’s EMU500 commuter trains. It has four carriages and a seating capacity of 60 passengers. Lion Travel is arranging railway tours for the express service. Several news outlets were invited to experience the pilot tour on the new express train service, which is to operate between Hualien Railway Station and Chihshang (池上) Railway Station in Taitung County. It would also be the first tourism service
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