■Crime
Wanted man caught
Police yesterday arrested a man and seized 26kg of amphetamines at his hiding place in Fengshan, Kaohsiung County. The fugitive, identified only by his surname of Huang, had been wanted by police for a 1996 shooting. He had been at large since that time, using a fake identification card to evade arrest. He told the police that the amphetamines were smuggled into Taiwan by a drug trafficking ring from a country that he did not name. The police are trying to track down other suspects in the drug ring which has allegedly brought amphetamines into the country.
■ Health
Thermometers to be given
The Taipei City Government has ordered one million electronic thermometers to help control SARS in the city, an official of the city's Bureau of Public Health said yesterday. The official said that some of the thermometers have already been delivered by suppliers and are being sold at most drugstores in the city at a discount price of NT$50 (US$1.43) each. To buy the product at the discount price, customers must show identification to prove they live in Taipei, he added. The city government hopes at least 50 percent of Taipei's households, or 400,000 families, will have thermometers within the coming week. The city government official said Taipei residents should take their temperature at least twice a day and should immediately call for an ambulance should their temperature exceed 38?C.
■ Health
Police fine family
Taipei police fined a family NT$1.2 million for breaking a domestic quarantine on Saturday. The parents and their two children received domestic quarantine notices because the father, surnamed Lin (林), was found to have a high fever and suspected of carrying SARS. Policemen visited Lin's residence at around 3pm on Saturday afternoon for a routine check but no one answered the door. Local police called Lin, who said they were all sleeping at home. Officers became suspicious and called again at Lin's residence. They waited at Lin's doors until around 6pm, when the family's four members returned by taxi. The couple told the policemen they had no choice but to break their home quarantine because the children were suffering from toothaches and had to be taken to the dentist.
■ Cross-strait
Former navy man jailed
A retired naval lieutenant commander has been sentenced to a 15-year jail term by China on espionage charges, it was reported yesterday. Lu Yi-chun (呂逸群), 48, was convicted last Thursday for allegedly serving as a Taiwan agent collecting information on China, Chinese-language media quoted former parliamentarian Feng Hu-hsiang as saying. Former lieutenant commander Lu, who retired from the navy in 1989 and set up a trading company in Shanghai in 1994, was arrested in Shanghai last May, said Feng, who now heads a private body for civil exchanges between Taiwan and China. The paper said that through Lu, Taiwan intelligence authorities had paid US$60,000 to a Chinese contact called Fu Jian (傅健) to obtain seven classified documents and other information. The court also sentenced Fu to 11 years in jail after he was allegedly found to have provided former lieutenant commander Lu with classified documents, the paper said.
Agencies
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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