■ Kaohsiung
MOI plans to revise law
As the vice speaker of Kaohsiung City Council was officially detained for January's vote-buying incident yesterday, officials from the Ministry of the Interior said that they have planned to revise the current regulations to replace speakers or vice speakers, if they are charged with vote-buying by prosecutors. Minister of the Interior Yu Cheng-hsien (余政憲) yesterday told reporters: "That's the direction to revise the law." Under the Law on Local Government Systems (地方自治法) speakers and vice speakers can only be replaced after a guilty verdict has been reached in a final trial. This has created a lot of difficulties for the ministry, as the public has urged it to remove councilors, speakers and vice-speakers involved in the vote-buying of the city council's speaker and vice-speaker elections this January.
■ Terrorism
Premier orders investigation
Premier Yu Shyi-kun ordered relevant government agencies yesterday to look into reports that unidentified Middle Eastern and Pakistani terrorist suspects might have sneaked into Taiwan. Yu issued the directive after listening to a briefing on the latest news reports furnished by the Government Information Office at a weekly Cabinet meeting. According to the reports, the US has recently assisted Pakistani authorities to launch an all-out crackdown on criminal and terrorist rings in Pakistan, prompting many terrorist suspects there to flee to South Africa, Israel and Taiwan. Yu said the National Police Administration under the Ministry of the Interior should investigate whether the reports are true.
■ Diplomacy
Six nations get visa-free stay
Taiwan will grant 14-day visa-free entry privileges to citizens of Brunei, Denmark, Ireland, Iceland, Malta and Morocco from April 1st, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced yesterday.
Passport holders from the above-mentioned six countries who intend to stay in Taiwan for up to 30 days can apply for landing visas at appointed airports or sea ports in Taiwan, the ministry said in a press release. The new measure is part of the government's efforts to attract more foreign tourists to realize its goal of doubling tourist arrivals by 2008, the ministry said.
■ Crime
Man arrested in labor scam
Police arrested a Pakistani man believed to be a member of a ring who they said swindled brokerage fees out of foreign laborers from South Asian countries, National Police Administration officials said yesterday. The police seized forged documents at the hotel where Hassan Mahabub Akhoda, was staying. Police were investigating an illegal brokerage agency cheating people from Bangladesh and Pakistan. After the ring obtained their money, they would arrange the victims to take flights to Taiwan and then desert them. Police said that the victims came to Taiwan on business or tourist visas and that they could not work according to the law. Many of the victims had been stranded in cheap hotels, leaving them no recourse but to seek aid from their countrymen at the mosque on Hsinsheng South Road. Some of the victims identified Akhoda when he came to the mosque to visit friends and turned him in to police. Akhoda claimed that he buys and sells telephones and parts, but he did admit that he went to CKS International Airport to pick up foreign laborers and take them to Taipei to arrange places for them to stay. He was paid US$600 per person, he said.
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