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Taiwan Quick Take

■ Crime
Bounty on fugitives raised
The cash reward for infor-mation leading to the arrest of prominent fugitives will be raised from the NT$1 million (US$29,410) to NT$10 million to give people more incentive to come forward, Premier Yu Shyi-kun said yesterday. Yu told lawmakers that the reward program is expected to be put into force in one week to facilitate apprehension of former Kaohsiung City Council speaker Chu An-hsiung (朱安雄), former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Wu Tse-yuan (伍澤元) and others. Yu said foreign nationals and governments, including that of China, would be eligible to receive the rewards. Chu was convicted of vote-buying. Wu was convicted of corruption in 1996.

■ Government
Control Yuan slams MOTC
Members of the Control Yuan imposed corrective mea-sures on the Ministry of Transportation and Com-munications yesterday for improperly handling of the release of shares of Chung-hua Telecom to public investors. "The ministry failed to carry out the share release of Chunghua Tele-com according to a plan mapped out by the govern-ment, which emphasized that the release must be based upon the principle of fair-ness to public investors," Control Yuan members said in their decision. They ruled that the ministry's derelic-tion of duty allowed key businesspeople to dominate the share release last December.

■ Taipei County
More people, less cash
Rapid population growth has aggravated the financial difficulties of the Taipei County Government, an official said yesterday. Lo Ching-hsio (駱清秀), director of the Department of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, told a county government meeting that over the past six years, the population has increased by 250,000 to 3.67 million, pushing up annual government spending from NT$63.2 billion (US$1.86 billion) in 1998 to NT$89.7 billion this year, or a hike of 42 percent. The spending increase and the decrease in tax revenues have boosted government debt to NT$56 billion, he said.

■ Health
SARS scare rebuffed by CDC
A person who recently returned from China was briefly suspected of being the first case of suspected SARS this fall, the Chinese-language media reported
late last night. The uniden-
tified person sought treat-ment at a private hospital
in Kaohsiung after suffering from a fever for two days,
a typical symptom of SARS. The hospital referred the patient to a municipal hos-pital for further treatment last night, triggering a panic among other patients at
the facility and their families. But a senior Center for Disease Control official
said that no new cases of SARS have been reported
to the center so far. "There
is no reported case of SARS in Kaohsiung. If there were such case, we would have reported it to the World Health Organization," said Shih Wen-yi (施文儀), the center's deputy director general.

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