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Taiwan News Quick Take

■ENVIRONMENT

EPA: Don’t flush toilet paper

Toilet paper should go into trash bins instead of the toilet bowl, the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said yesterday, countering recent media reports calling on the public to flush used tissue paper to “reduce the amount of trash because tissues disintegrate in water.” “With an 18 percent connection rate of Taiwan’s buildings to the underground sewage pipes, more than 60 percent of homes still rely on septic tanks to process sewage,” said Chen Hsien-heng (陳咸亨), director-general of the EPA’s water quality protection department. “However, tissue paper in septic tanks increases the pollution density of the waste and in turn worsens the overall water quality of rivers [where waste in septic tanks end up],” Chen said. This is true even if products are labeled “biodegradable,” Chen said. To instill in people good habits and to avoid confusion, the EPA advises against throwing anything into toilet bowls.



■CRIME

KMT legislator charged

The Taichung Public Prosecutors Office indicted Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Justin Huang (黃健庭) on Friday on charges of taking bribes between 2004 and 2005 during his previous legislative term. Prosecutors said they were seeking a 10-year sentence for Huang, who was indicted for accepting more than NT$2 million (US$63,640) in bribes from two pharmaceutical companies to lobby on their behalf to obtain approval from the Bureau of National Health Insurance (BNHI) to change the brand-name of one of the company’s products. The BNHI also agreed to the price the company sought for prescriptions of the medicine. The KMT lawmaker later used dummy employee accounts to accept more than NT$1 million in “salaries” paid by the two companies.



■LEISURE

Boy finishes bicycling tour

Seven-year-old Chiu En-chia (邱恩加) from Tainan City recently completed a cycling tour that took him across Germany and the Netherlands and earned him the title of the youngest Taiwanese to complete a cycling trip of more than 1,000 km. Chiu and his parents were part of a special tour group that cycled along the Rhine River from Frankfurt in Germany to Amsterdam in the Netherlands in 29 days, starting June 29, local media reported yesterday. Chiu’s parents said they still could not believe that their son, who graduated from kindergarten this summer, completed the 1,000km journey. Chiu broke the record of Hsu Chan-jen (許湛然) of Taiwan, who cycled 1,022km in 30 days across Germany and Denmark at the age of nine with his parents last summer. After he returned home, Hsu published an account of his journey, entitled Family Travel by Bike — A Boy’s Cycling Diary.



■SOCIETY

Percentage of disabled rises

The number of citizens with physical or mental disabilities has continued to increase, having climbed to 4.47 percent of the country’s population at the end of June, a report by the Ministry of the Interior said on Friday. The figure rose from 4.37 percent at the end of June last year and 3.37 percent at the end of 2001, the report stated. At the end of June, the number of registered disabled individuals totaled 1.027 million, up 26,000, or 2.6 percent, over the year-earlier level. Of these disabled individuals, those with limb disorders formed the largest group, accounting for 38.9 percent of the total disabled population.


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