■ EDUCATION
NCCU to host prize winners
Pulitzer Prize winners Steve Fainaru and Liu Heung-shing (劉香成) will visit National Chengchi University (NCCU) tomorrow and on Saturday, the school said yesterday. Liu, the winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and a former photographer for The Associated Press, will give a speech titled “Keeping Record of China through Photography” at 3:40pm tomorrow, NCCU said. Fainaru, a reporter for the Washington Post, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, will deliver a speech on reporting international conflicts and wars at 9am on Saturday, the school said.
■ CRIME
Chen defends former aide
Former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) office yesterday jumped to a former aide’s defense, saying that former Presidential Office deputy secretary-general Ma Yung-cheng (馬永成) did not pocket the “state affairs fund” or use fake receipts to claim funds. Ma was taken into custody on Tuesday for suspected embezzlement of public funds during Chen’s presidency. Chen’s office issued a statement yesterday saying that the president’s discretionary fund did not all come from the budget of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the fund was used for public purposes only. Chen did not pocket any of the money, either, the statement said. The statement said that some expenses used for secret diplomatic missions were not recorded, but this did not mean the money was not spent. To find out the truth of the matter, the statement said, prosecutors must conduct a thorough investigation into the spending of the fund to see whether the money was actually spent on public affairs as Chen claimed.
■ CRIME
Drug ring busted by police
A mobile investigation unit made up of Coast Guard Administration officers and local police busted a drug ring in Kaohsiung City on Tuesday, arresting four suspects and seizing weapons and an assortment of illicit drugs. The unit said it seized 4.4kg of heroin, 14kg of amphetamines, 0.7kg of marijuana, and 172g of ketamine, along with three guns. Members of the ring had been selling drugs in the city and had rented an apartment in the area to carry out their drug operations, according to the unit. After following and monitoring the drug ring members’ activities for several days, officers from the unit decided to intercept them while driving in the city and proceeded to detain them while a search of their apartment was carried out.
■ HEALTH
Organ donation ranks high
The organ donation rate in Taiwan is the second highest in Asia and the Middle East, behind Israel, but still lags far behind that of Western countries, the Department of Health’s Bureau of Medical Affairs said yesterday. According to the bureau, a yearly average of 6.8 people per million people in Taiwan donated organs in the past three years, while the number for Israel was 8.8 per million. But that rate is much lower than those in Western countries. Spain had a yearly average of 34.4 donors during the same three years; the US had a rate of 25.1 and France’s rate was 23.6, according to the bureau. Nonetheless, Taiwan’s rate is increasing rapidly, officials said. This year, 161 people who passed away in Taiwan donated their organs to help 597 people, an increase of 41 percent from last year, Louis Liu (劉在銓), chief executive officer of the Taiwan Organ Registry and Sharing Center, told a news conference.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened 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), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
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