■ 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.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
THE TOUR: Pope Francis has gone on a 12-day visit to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore. He was also invited to Taiwan The government yesterday welcomed Pope Francis to the Asia-Pacific region and said it would continue extending an invitation for him to visit Taiwan. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs made the remarks as Pope Francis began a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific on Monday. He is to travel about 33,000km by air to visit Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore, and would arrive back in Rome on Friday next week. It would be the longest and most challenging trip of Francis’ 11-year papacy. The 87-year-old has had health issues over the past few years and now uses a wheelchair. The ministry said
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi
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