■ CRIME
Taiwanese jailed in Vietnam
A Vietnamese court has sentenced a Taiwanese man to 10 years in jail for smuggling more than US$1.3 million in diamonds into the country, state media said yesterday. The Ho Chi Minh City People's Court sentenced Chen Hsin-hsiung, 45, on Tuesday for illegally importing 15,182 diamonds and selling more than 9,000 for more than US$1.3 million, the Cong An Nhan Dan (People's Police) daily reported. Chen was arrested in September 2004 when customs officials at the airport in Ho Chi Minh City discovered the undeclared diamonds in his luggage. He had arrived on a flight from Taiwan. Police later raided his house and jewelry store in central Ho Chi Minh City, seizing more than 1,900 diamonds and about 150 pieces of jewelry, which the judge ruled would be forfeited to the state.
■ CRIME
NPA raids fake sock warehose
The National Police Agency's intellectual property rights division said yesterday it had cracked down on a counterfeit ring that was producing fake big-name sports socks for online purchase. The police raided a warehouse in Shulin (樹林), Taipei County, on Monday, where they discovered nearly 1,000 pairs of counterfeit Nike, Adidas, Puma and Levi's sports socks. They arrested a man surnamed Lai, the suspected ringleader. The police referred Lai to the Banciao District Prosecutors' Office for further questioning. Lai is suspected of selling the counterfeit sports socks on the Internet and delivering them to online customers by mail, police said. His products were described as being as good as the originals, with identical labels and all the latest styles available.
■ TOURISM
Visitor statistics released
Thirty-four tourist spots have attracted more than 18 million local and foreign tourists from January to June, statistics from the Taipei City Department of Budget, Accounting and Statistics showed yesterday. National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall was the most popular tourist spot in the city, attracting more than 6 million people during the period, followed by National Palace Museum and Taipei Zoo, with about 1.6 million. The department said that the number of visitors to the city had increased 9.8 percent from last year, with about 100,000 tourists visiting the attractions daily. Longshan Temple attracted about 8,000 people every day, while the Taipei 101 observatory deck received 3,000.
■ ENVIRONMENT
EPA fines three companies
Six companies were recently fined by the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) for excessive water use, an EPA official said yesterday. The three companies -- Formosa Plastics Corp (台塑), Formosa Chemicals and Fiber Corp (台塑石化) and Nan Chung Petrochemical Corp (南中石化) -- used excessive water to the tune of 10.1 percent, 4.7 percent and 20 percent respectively, a survey conducted by the EPA between July 3 and July 15 showed, the official said. The EPA fined them for failing to comply with the guidelines on water usage stipulated in an environmental impact assessment made by the EPA to demand that companies conserve water, the official said. Formosa Plastics was fined NT$1 million (US$30,500), while Formosa Chemicals and Fiber was fined NT$850,000 and Nan Chung Petrochemical NT$650,000, the official said. EPA will conduct another survey before Dec. 31 to ensure the companies are complying with the guidelines.
■ HEALTH
Thousands fail to get tested
During the past three years, approximately 33 percent of women over 30 in Taipei -- about 250,000 -- have failed to take a cervical smear test despite an increasing number of women taking such tests, a city health department official said yesterday. Starting in 1995, the government began to provide free annual tests under the National Health Insurance program for women aged 30 and above. Chao Kuan-chung (趙灌中), a medical doctor at the Taipei Veterans General Hospital's Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, said the test can help identify cervical cancer in its early stages, thus improving the effectiveness of patient treatment. The disease is curable if found in early stages, Chao said, urging women to undergo regular Pap smears.
■ CRIME
Principal's obituary forged
Police are searching for a person who distributed an obituary for a university principal who is still alive, a newspaper said yesterday. Hsia Cheng-hua (夏誠華), principal of Hsuan Chuang University in Hsinchu, began to receive telephone calls last week from friends who had learned that he had "died." The callers said they had seen Hsia's obituary, which said the 53-year-old had been "called by the Lord." United Daily News reported that when Hsia died, his six children were at his side. But the names of Hsia's children in the obituary were the names of staff members at the university. Although Hsia scrambled to correct the rumor, some people sent wreaths to the funeral parlor where the funeral was said to be taking place. Hsinchu police are hunting for the person who distributed the obituary, and planned to charge him or her with falsifying documents.
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
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
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
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,