■ Crime
Criminals repatriated
Four criminals wanted in Taiwan -- including a gang leader -- who had fled to China have been repatriated back to Taiwan via Macau, Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) officials said yesterday. The CIB officials said that with the assistance of the Macau police they were able to trace the four, identified as Oung Chi-ching (翁之靖), 52, Wei Yung-tien (魏永田), 47, Wang Shao-hung (王紹鴻), 40, and Chang Cheng-chun (張正春), 39. All four were expelled by the Chinese authorities to Macau. Taiwan police, working with their Macau counterparts, then brought the four suspects back to Taiwan. Police said the repatriation is a positive result of a crackdown on crime and sends a message that criminals who flee to China will no longer find a safe haven there.
■ Water
Reservoir level drops
The water level in the Feitsui Reservoir in northern Taipei County had fallen below 150m as of late Thursday, the lowest level since the beginning of this year and a record February low since the reservoir's opening 15 years ago. The water level is 10m lower than the average for this month and about 4.5m lower than the level recorded for the corresponding month last year. The water level Thursday evening was just 52.52 percent of capacity. Despite precipitation over the past week, the reservoir has received only a limited amount of additional water. Although Taipei Water Department Director Kuo Juei-hua (郭瑞華) said it remains too early to talk about water rationing, he urged the public not to waste the resource and added that his department has asked public establishments and schools to be equipped with water-conservation equipment starting next month.
■ Environment
EPA denies pricing policy
The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said yesterday it has not yet set any timetable for an across-the-board implementation of a unit-based garbage collection pricing system. The Cabinet-level agency was responding to media reports that the EPA will begin to collect per-bag garbage disposal fees countrywide by the end of this year. "The report is not true," said Chen Hsiung-wen (陳雄文), an EPA department chief in charge of solid-waste disposal. At present, only the Taipei City Government implements a per-bag policy for garbage collection. "The success of the Taipei experience might not necessarily be suitable for enforcement in other cities and counties at the moment," Chen said, adding that the EPA will evaluate manpower resources, relevant facilities and environmental education in various areas before setting a timetable for implementing such a pricing system.
■ Japan
Student arrested for forgery
A Taiwanese student studying at a private college in Japan has been arrested in connection to a credit-card forgery ring, police said yesterday. Police also seized around 800 forged and genuine credit cards, as well as equipment used to produce counterfeit credit cards. Police said that Chen Kuo-wen (陳國文), 33, who lives in Tokyo, was involved in producing 10 fake credit cards in mid-November based on cards issued to foreign customers by 10 operators in France, Britain and Sweden. Police said that four people, including Taiwanese and Japanese, used the forged cards to shop for electrical appliances in Tokyo at the end of last year, and then resold them for at least ?70 million (around US$580,000).
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