The Tai-Ex opened marginally lower this morning from yesterday's close, at

17,341 on turnover of 3.1-billion N-T.

The Tai-Ex followed most other regional markets and lost ground on Tuesday -

falling by 199-points - as investors lacked cues from Wall Street overnight

due to U-S markets being closed on Monday.

The Centers for Disease Control has released the contract used to purchase

Medigen Vaccine Biologics' coronavirus vaccine.

According to C-D-C Director General Zhuang Ren-xiang, the 58-page document

was made public after Medigen's board of directors passed a resolution

authorizing (授權) the government to release it.

Zhuang says the contract had been reviewed by the Control Yuan, the National

Audit Office, and the Legislature prior to its being made public and no

evidence of illegal behavior was found.

The contract was signed in May of 2021, and the government purchased

5-million doses of the Medigen vaccine, of which 200,000 were donations for

the government's help in funding the vaccine's development.

And,

The Hsinchu District Court has sentenced a former university professor to

six-months in prison for falsifying (偽造) documents relating to the safety

inspection and assessment of three road bridges in Hsinchu County.

Chen Ming-cheng owned an engineering consulting firm based in Taoyuan.

Chen was found guilty of instructing a student employee to file fake reports

indicating that the Tai-He, the Hou-Hu and the Rui-Guang bridges in Xin-Feng

Township had all been inspected.

The student employee was sentenced to 4 months imprisonment, suspended for

two years.

Both verdicts can be appealed.

The French president has set out new policies ranging from liberal market

reforms to an overhaul (檢修) of parental leave.

Emmanuel Macron made the announcements in a marathon news conference on

Tuesday.

Ross Cullen reports from Paris.

Shell has reached an agreement with a consortium of companies to sell its

onshore business in Nigeria's Niger Delta in a deal worth $2.4 billion.

It is the latest move by the London-based energy major to limit its presence

in the challenging Niger Delta environment, where it has faced decadeslong

local pushbacks to its oil exploration.

Activists want Shell to address environmental damage, such as compensation

(賠償) for affected communities, as a condition for the government's approval

of the deal.

Shell says the deal is designed to preserve its commitments, including

remediation where spills occurred in the past.

Kenya has embarked on its biggest rhino relocation project and has begun the

difficult work of tracking, darting and moving 21 of the critically

endangered beasts to a new home.

A previous attempt at moving rhinos in the East African nation in 2018 was a

disaster as all 11 of the animals died.

The rhinos are being relocated to a conservancy because they need more space

to roam and, hopefully, to breed.

Rhinos are generally solitary (獨自的) animals and are at their happiest in

large territories.

There are just 6,487 wild rhinos left in the world, according to rhino

conservation charity Save The Rhino, all of them in Africa.

Kenyan authorities say they have relocated more than 150 rhinos in the last

decade.

That was the I.C.R.T. news,

Check in again tomorrow for our simplified version of the news, uploaded

every day in the afternoon.

Enjoy the rest of your day, I'm _____.

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