Taiwan Post Co mailboxes apparently have become the first choice among pickpockets and lazy do-gooders, who use them to dispose of lost or stolen wallets, identification documents and other items.
Every week, 40 to 50 wallets, personal identification cards and ATM cards are found in the more than 2,000 Taiwan Post mailboxes in the Taipei region, which includes Taipei City and Shenkeng (
Other items found include passports, EasyCards, drivers' licenses and even "Taiwan compatriot travel documents" issued for Taiwanese traveling in China, postmen said.
Postman Chen Yen-ching (
Hung Kuang-yi (
Hung said that although this adds to the post office's burden, it is also a reward to the see the smiles on the faces of people who come to pick up their stolen belongings.
Chen said that in his 20 years as a postman, the worst thing he has found in a mailbox was a bag of feces in a mailbox on Chongqing S Road.
He had to find a restroom to clean up before going back to the post office and to clean every piece of mail that had been smeared with the feces before being able to deliver it.
He has also found people waiting by a mailbox for him to get there and open it because they had accidentally managed to drop in their wallet or ID along with their mail.
Hung said that in the area around Taipei's main railway station, it is also common to find hotel keys, maybe dropped there by people who had to check out in a hurry to catch a train and forgotten to return the key.
It would then fall upon the postman to find the hotel and return the key with the help of the name on the keyring.
Hung also told of one postman who was told by a couple of kids they had set off firecrackers in a mailbox to test if that would amplify the sound.
To their dismay, they said: "the sound of the explosion was muffled instead."
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