■Crime
Taiwanese nabbed in China
Chinese police have arrested four Taiwanese for allegedly hiring a Chinese fisherman to smuggle heroin to Taiwan, the official Xinhua News Agency reported yesterday. The four were arrested in Fujian Province, the report said. Chinese authorities say heroin, most of it from Southeast Asia, increasingly is smuggled through China by Chinese and foreign gangs for export to Hong Kong and other markets. The fisherman was caught Tuesday with nearly 3kg of heroin, Xinhua said. It said the fisherman and his Taiwanese contact, identified by the surname Yan, confessed that a Taiwanese ship was on its way to pick up the drugs. Police later seized the ship and arrested the men on board, Xinhua said.
■ Crime
Dentist in sex scandal
A dentist has been charged with allegedly molesting five women patients after telling them that he needed to check them for the AIDS virus, a Chinese-language newspaper reported yesterday. You Ying-fang (游應芳), 44, owner of Ji Tien dentist clinic in Pingtung County, was charged on Tuesday with a sex offense, the paper said. "A teenage girl visited You's clinic for treatment of a toothache. You said he had found AIDS cells in her gums and demanded a physical checkup," the paper quoted a policeman as saying. Authorities said the girl was then made to lie down on his desk while he examined her and extracted a bodily fluid sample, saying he would do an AIDS test. Fearing she might have been infected with AIDS, the girl went to a hospital for an AIDS test. After she told her doctor what had happened, she was told a dentist cannot detect the AIDS virus in a person's gums.
■ Weather
Storm warning issued
Thundershowers may occur in the afternoons for the next three days and residents living in the west of the country should take precautionary measures, according to the Central Weather Bureau yesterday. Two women in Nantou County were killed by lightning Tuesday afternoon as they harvested ginger using scissors. Weather forecasters said yesterday that sometimes the energy released by a violent thundershower could be equal to that released by an atomic bomb. When it thunders, officials said, people should stay away from isolated tall buildings or towers, chimneys and big trees. They also urged people to discard metal accessories, such as watches and mobile phones as quickly as possible when thunderstorms appear.
■ Politics
PFP backs HK protests
Several PFP legislators and officials joined scores of party members to rally in front of the Legislative Yuan yesterday in support of the people of Hong Kong and against Beijing's pressuring the Hong Kong government to enact an anti-subversion law. The demonstrators shouted slogans and carried placards, reading "We are against the `one country, two systems' formula, we are opposed to Beijing's infringing upon freedom of speech." In a statement issued during the rally, the PFP voiced its full support for the Hong Kong residents' efforts to safeguard their basic rights and freedoms. It denounced Beijing and the territory's government for pushing Article 23 of the territory's Basic Law. The PFP said that a massive protest in Hong Kong last week highlighted the pitfalls of Beijing's "one country, two systems" formula.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the