A recent gang war in Taichung has green and blue politicians pointing fingers and city residents wondering whether the city can sustain its dropping crime rates.
City police have responded to four gang-related attacks in the past 11 days in which a total of 50 bullets were fired.
All the attacks occurred in broad daylight.
Democratic Progressive Party City Councilor Fan Sung-yu (范淞育) has called on Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強) to take responsibility, saying Taichung had possibly become the shooting capital of Taiwan since Hu came to office in 2002.
Fan said that Taichung police had wasted assistance from the central government by spending too much time trying to catch drunk drivers and issuing tickets instead of addressing the city's major problems.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) City Councilor Yang Cheng-chung (
Taichung has been combatting recurring gang feuds and violence for more than a decade. Notable cases have included Wu Tung-huang (
Also that year, two people were killed and three wounded when a fight broke out during negotiations at a tea house between boss Lin Ming-hua (
Gang violence in Taichung had decreased between 2005 and last year after Lin's gang and that of rival leader Chang Hsi-ming (
However, two men were injured on March 12 during a shootout in a residential area, which was followed by rifle attacks on a pub and a massage parlor by three suspects five days later, in which 30 shots were fired.
Police said that both incidents were part of a gang war between rival bosses surnamed Liu (
After the Lunar New Year, top gang leaders appeared to be responding to police efforts to orchestrate a truce, but each effort collapsed and was followed by fresh violence.
Director-General of the National Police Agency Hou You-yi (
No sooner had Hou left than gang boss Lin Chen-hsing (
Taichung Deputy Mayor Hsiao Chia-chi (
Hsiao said that despite the recent incidents, crime statistics on the whole had been dropping since the end of last year.
He also said that polls had shown growing satisfaction among city residents, reflecting overall satisfaction with the improvement in public safety.
Hsiao said that the city government was focusing on the problem of gang violence, adding that he had told the police force to do everything possible to solve the crimes.
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