Taiwan

President urges China not to talk to his rival

Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian on Monday offered peace talks with Beijing, apparently seeking to regain the high ground from a political rival who is on a headline-grabbing visit to China.

Implicit in Chen’s speech during a visit to the Marshall Islands was a message to Chinese leaders that they should be talking to him, the elected president, not to Lien Chan, the man he has twice defeated at the polls.

The Chinese leadership, which has rebuffed all of Chen’s requests to meet during the past five years, has warmly welcomed Lien, making the Taiwanese president look ineffectual on one of Taiwan’s gravest challenges — China’s threat of force to regain sovereignty over the island.

In Monday’s speech, Chen sought to come across as a flexible peacemaker rather than a troublemaker stoking one of Asia’s most dangerous crises.

But Beijing is unlikely to be impressed until Chen shows more interest in its sacred goal of unification. The Taiwanese leader continues to insist that only Taiwan’s voters can determine its future.

Japan

Panel: Emergency brake contributed to derailment

The driver applied the emergency brake in last week’s fatal train derailment in Japan, The Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper learned Monday.

The Construction and Transport Ministry’s Aircraft and Railway Accident Investigation Commission concluded that the driver, Ryujiro Takami, 23, who died in the accident, applied the emergency brake, contributing to the train’s derailment and rollover as it entered a curve at excessive speed.

A train driver typically controls the brake with a right-hand lever and engine power with a left-hand lever. The brakes are controlled by moving the lever back and forth across eight levels. When the driver pushes the brakes to the forwardmost position, the emergency brake is applied.

The investigation commission concluded that the seven-car train’s right wheels came off the tracks as it traveled around the curve and leaned to the left before its lead car overturned. It also said the unprecedented derailment and rollover was caused because the train entered the curve at a speed of more than 62 mph and the emergency brake was applied.

LONDON

Bunker nurse describes weak, shaking Hitler

Adolf Hitler was a shaking, graying, weakened man who “sank into himself” in the final days before his suicide on April 30, 1945, according to the first published account of his nurse, who worked in his bunker as Allied forces closed in on Berlin.

Erna Flegel, now 93 and living in a nursing home in northern Germany, told Britain’s Guardian newspaper in an interview published Monday that Hitler “had a lot of gray hair and gave the impression of a man at least 15 to 20 years older,” toward the end of his life.

“In the last few days, Hitler sank into himself,” Flegel said. “He shook a great deal, walking was difficult for him, his right side was still very much weakened as a result of the attempt on his life (in July 1944).”

With defeat imminent, Hitler, 56, shot himself and his mistress Eva Braun committed suicide by taking cyanide in his underground bunker in Berlin.

The Guardian said Flegel had never given a public account before of her job as Hitler’s nurse. But as the 60th anniversary of end of World War II approached this weekend, she was speaking out for the first time.

Flegel’s existence became known after the transcript of an interview she gave to U.S. interrogators was declassified by the CIA four years ago, according to the Guardian.