■CRIME
Taxis install SOS buttons
Thousands of taxis in Taipei plan to install emergency reporting gear following the grisly killing of a taxi driver by five youths earlier this week, the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) reported yesterday. As Taipei’s radio taxis are already equipped with global positioning systems (GPS), after a driver pushes an SOS button beside the steering wheel, dispatchers will be able to determine where the taxi is and alert police to the location. When switched on, the emergency reporting gear can also serve as a microphone so that dispatchers can hear inside the vehicle. The plans were prompted by the slaying of a taxi driver in Taichung, the Liberty Times reported. On Wednesday, five youths aged 15 to 21 years old attacked a taxi driver in Taichung and robbed him of NT$1,900. The suspects stabbed the driver 31 times, dumped him in the mountains and drove off with his taxi. The driver bled to death and police arrested the five youths later on Wednesday.
■HEALTH
CPC wants caffeine labels
With the increasing popularity of fresh-brewed coffee, now one of the most popular drinks, chain coffee shops and convenience stores that sell fresh-brewed coffee have been urged to provide labels that include caffeine content. The Consumer Protection Commission (CPC) has renewed a call for convenience stores to follow a voluntary labeling system that coffee stores adopted in August 2006 when they agreed with the CPC’s proposal to use the colors red, yellow and green to denote different levels of caffeine content. CPC official Liu Ching-fang (劉清芳) said yesterday that the proposal was based on research by the EU Scientific Committee on Food that suggested caffeine consumption of under 300mg per day was not harmful to the health. Under the system, the green label marks a caffeine content of under 100mg, while yellow represents between 100mg and 200mg and red signals more than 200mg of caffeine, Liu said.
■CRIME
Malaysia charges suspects
A Malaysian court has charged four Taiwanese men with trafficking 1,439kg of drugs worth US$16.4 million, news reports said yesterday. The four chemists, aged 30 to 36 years old, pleaded not guilty to the charge of trafficking the hypnotic drug nimetazepam, better known as Erimin or Erimin 5, the Bernama news agency reported. If found guilty, the four men face mandatory death sentences by hanging. The seizure, recorded as the biggest drug haul in the country, came during a March 22 raid on a factory in the southern state of Johor. Nimetazepan was originally made to treat insomnia but is often sold in Asia as a substitute for ecstasy. Police also seized machines used to process the drugs, about 430kg of powder used in manufacturing the drug and thousands of pills in the raid.
■DIPLOMACY
Ma plans video conference
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) will hold a video conference with US think tanks from the Presidential Office late this month to mark the 30th anniversary of the Taiwan Relations Act. Presidential Office spokesman Wang Yu-chi made the announcement after Ma received Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a few days ago and expressed hopes that the AEI would hold activities to discuss issues related to the act as it is a key element of US policy toward Taiwan. This would be the first overseas video conference Ma has held since taking office.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods