■ POLITICS
Two guilty of vote-buying
The Taoyuan District Court yesterday sentenced Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Liao Cheng-ching (廖正井) to three years and six months in prison on vote-buying charges. Liao’s vote captain Liao Ching-fu (廖慶福) was sentenced to two years and six months in jail. The verdict is not final. Asked for comment, Liao Cheng-ching protested his innocence, adding that he would appeal. The court said Liao Ching-fu gave five residents of Weiwu Village in Kuanyin Township (觀音) NT$25,000 in total when he was running for legislator in December 2007 and asked another resident, Liao Wen-chen (廖文振), to help the legislator buy votes at the price of NT$5,000 per person, the court said. The court also annulled Liao’s election victory in the first trial of another civil suit on the same charges. He has appealed the verdict.
■ SOCIETY
Gondola tower almost ready
The relocation of an unsafe tower on the Maokong Gondola system in Taipei City is expected to be completed in December, Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) said yesterday. The gondola has been closed since Oct. 1 last year after support tower No. 16’s foundation and the hillside on which it sits were eroded by torrential rain brought by Typhoon Jangmei. In a policy report to the city council, Hau said the project began on June 26 and was scheduled to be completed by the end of December. Soil conservation measures are being adopted and a shaft is being built at the new site of the tower, Hau said. Meanwhile, the city government has since Dec. 16 been carrying out work to reinforce the slope where the tower was originally situated, he said. The work is set to be completed by Dec. 15 this year, he added.
■ FOREIGN AID
Hand offered to Guatemala
Taiwan will donate US$500,000 in relief aid to Guatemala, one of its allies in Latin America, to help alleviate a food shortage caused by drought, an official at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday. The donation will be handed over to the Guatemalan government by the embassy there for humanitarian purposes, said Lin Cheng-hui (林正惠), deputy director-general of the ministry’s Bureau of Central and South American Affairs. Guatemala has had a prolonged dry spell this year, which has extended to November because of the El Nino effect. The drought has affected the harvest of staples like maize, red beans and rice, resulting in food shortages and an increase in food prices, Lin said. The price of food has risen above what most poor people in Guatemala can afford, he added.
■ ENVIRONMENT
Meat-free Mondays touted
A civic group that is urging people to refrain from eating meat every Monday to help reduce greenhouse gases has set up a Web site to promote its cause. The site, www.meatfree.org.tw, will serve as a platform for members of the group to exchange their experiences in not eating meat, said Hsu Jen-hsiu (徐仁修), one of the group’s leaders. Livestock emit large volumes of methane into the atmosphere, which contributes more to global warming than the emissions produced by all the vehicles around the world, Hsu said. Hsu said his group is recruiting individual, group and restaurant members. Group members should serve meat-free dishes in their cafeterias every Monday, while restaurant members should offer a menu where one-third of the dishes come without meat, Hsu said. Individual members will be encouraged to eat meat-free meals every Monday, he said.
■ DEFENSE
Forum to open in Virginia
An annual conference on Taiwan-US strategic security cooperation will be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, from Sunday to Tuesday, organizers said. The eighth US-Taiwan Defense Industry Conference will bring together senior officials and academics from the two countries to discuss security issues of mutual concern, organizers said. The US-Taiwan Business Council, which groups US companies with interests in Taiwan, has organized the event annually since 2002, when then-defense minister Tang Yiau-min (湯曜明) represented Taiwan at the first meeting in St. Petersburg, Florida. Rupert Hammond-Chambers, president of the US-Taiwan Defense Industry Conference, said on Monday the agenda for this year’s meeting would focus on US-Taiwan defense cooperation and Taiwan’s future defense and security needs. The conference will discuss Taiwan’s military transformation and strategic changes, military modernization, integration and defense innovation, Hammond-Chambers said. Wallace Gregson, US assistant secretary of defense in charge of Asia-Pacific security affairs; David Shear, deputy US assistant secretary of state in charge of East Asian and Pacific affairs; and Deputy Defense Minister Chao Shih-chang (趙世璋) will deliver keynote speeches.
■ DIPLOMACY
MOFA to invite Lugo
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) will likely invite Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo to visit in the first half of next year, an official said yesterday. Lugo was unable to accept an invitation to visit this year because of his schedule, said Lin Cheng-hui (林正惠), deputy director-general of the MOFA’s Department of Latin American and Caribbean Affairs.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching