■ Crime
Police seize fake drug haul
A big haul of counterfeit medicine, including the prized weight-loss drug Reductil, intended for online sale in Taiwan, has been seized, the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) announced yesterday. CIB investigators raided the homes of two men, surnamed Wu and Chen, in Taichung and seized more than 5,000 tablets of counterfeit medicine. The haul included l2,000 tablets of the anti-obesity medicine Reductil (Sibutramine), 1,500 tablets of Viagra, 280 tablets of Cialis -- another drug for the treatment of erectile dysfunction -- and 1,600 other unknown pills. The investigators learned that the fake pills were manufactured in China and smuggled into Taiwan by people returning from China, intended for sale to Taiwanese customers via online transactions, CIB officials said.
■ Labor
Disabled to get more jobs
The Ministry of the Interior will draft revisions to the law that require more job openings for mentally or physically challenged individuals, Minister of the Interior Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) said. Under the terms of the Disabled People Protection Law (身心障礙者保護法), public agencies with a staff of more than 50 must have at least 2 percent of their staff include people with physical or mental disabilities. Meanwhile, private enterprises with a staff of more than 100 must ensure that at least 1 percent of their staffers are people with disabilities. As of the end of September, private and public agencies had employed a total of 45,400 disabled staffers, exceeding the mandatory minimum of 33,955. Su said the ministry plans to raise the disabled hiring ratio for public agencies to 3 percent.
■ Education
Taiwan, Ohio ink agreement
The Ministry of Education has signed a memorandum of cooperation with the US state of Ohio under which the state government will help recruit teachers to teach English in Taiwanese elementary schools, Taiwan officials said on Thursday. The Ohio government will also recruit Taiwanese teachers to teach Chinese in the state next year, according to Hsu Hui-wen (徐會文), chief of the cultural affairs division of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Chicago. Ohio is the second US state after Indiana to establish an educational cooperation agreement with Taiwan. Hsu said that according to the terms of the memorandum signed on Nov. 29, Ohio's Department of Education will help post a notice detailing Taiwan's plan to recruit teachers, with 15 openings available in the initial stage.
■ Sports
Kaohsiung in for 2011 games
A screening team of the National Council on Physical Fitness and Sports has selected Kaohsiung to represent the nation in the country's bid to host the 2011 World University Games. Council officials said that one of the government's major policies is to bid to host international athletic meets, noting that Taipei has been awarded the right to host the 2009 Deaflympic Games for athletes with hearing impairments, and that Kaohsiung has already been awarded the right to host the 2009 World Games. In the near future, they have set the goal of bidding to host the World University Games with the aim of accumulating more experience in sponsoring international events to achieve the eventual goals of bidding to host the 2018 Asian Games and the 2020 Olympic Games.
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