Police officers from the two sides of the Taiwan Strait met for the first time yesterday on Kinmen to discuss cooperation in fighting cross-strait criminal operations.
An 11-member delegation from the police association in the southeastern Chinese port city of Xiamen arrived in Kinmen via a direct voyage early in the morning to attend the seminar.
The seminar was organized by Taiwan's Central Police University with the support of the Cabinet-level Mainland Affairs Council, the Coast Guard Administration, the Kinmen County Government and the Kinmen County Police Bureau.
Huang Demao (黃德茂), the president of the Xiamen Police Association, said at the seminar that since the direct Kinmen-to-Xiamen shipping service opened two years ago, it has become a shortcut for criminals dodging the law.
"More than 90 percent of criminal cases reported in the Xiamen area were related to Taiwan's underworld gangs, and many mainland criminals have also used Xiamen as a springboard to go to Kinmen and Taiwan in recent years," Huang said.
Worse still, Huang said, underworld rings on both sides have often colluded in gun smuggling, drug trafficking, currency counterfeiting, kidnapping and insurance fraud.
"Such operations have threatened public order on both sides of the Strait and posed serious challenges to law enforcement officers," Huang said, adding that the two sides should forge a collaborative mechanism to fight cross-border crime.
Speaking on the same occasion, Central Police University President Tsai Hui-teh (蔡德輝) said cross-strait anti-crime cooperation should start with collaboration between Kinmen and Xiamen.
"With Kinmen and Xiamen emerging as important conduits for cross-strait exchanges, law enforcement authorities in the two regions should cooperate closely in order to fight cross-border crime," Tsai said.
Eight papers on human smuggling and drug trafficking in the Kinmen and Xiamen areas as well as difficulties in law enforcement and other related subjects were read and discussed in the one-day seminar.
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