■CRIME
Alleged fraudsters nabbed
Police yesterday arrested two alleged members of a crime ring that disguises numbers of incoming phone calls. Members of the National Police Agency (NPA) and the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) accompanied Kaohsiung district prosecutors yesterday to make the arrests in Fengshan (鳳山市), Kaohsiung County. The pair were arrested in connection with operating computer equipment to assist fraudsters making calls, police chief Shen Chien-ren (沈建仁) said. The equipment can falsify phone numbers to simulate a fake number when the receiver sees the caller ID. It can also change the serial numbers of cellphone SIM cards to prevent investigators from tracking them. Police say this is the first time such equipment has been confiscated in Taiwan. Fraudsters typically instruct people to withdraw money from an ATM or fill out forms at a bank to transfer money to criminals’ bank accounts. Those who have received suspicious phone calls should verify the validity of the caller by calling back to see if the number reached the same caller, police said. People receiving fraudulent phone calls can report them by dialing the toll-free number 165.
■HEALTH
Physician’s Act amended
A Cabinet meeting yesterday approved an amendment to the Physician’s Act (醫師法) setting new conditions for individuals obtaining medical degrees abroad to practice medicine in Taiwan. Graduates from foreign medical schools will not be allowed to sit qualification examinations in Taiwan unless their degree certificates are authenticated by the Ministry of Education and they have successfully completed an internship. The amendment comes after a demonstration by medical students on Sunday that called on the government to address the problem of increasing numbers of students seeking medical degrees in eastern European countries that became members of the EU in recent years. In Taiwan, medical students must complete a seven-year course and a two-year internship before qualifying for license exams, while a medical student in Poland, for example, only needs to study for four years and is not required to do an internship.
■HEALTH
Two more H1N1 cases
The Central Epidemics Command Centers (CECC) yesterday announced another two confirmed swine flu cases, bringing the nation’s total of confirmed cases to 16. Both had recently returned from New York. CECC spokesman Shih Wen-yi (施文儀) said one was a 25-year-old graduate student who arrived in Taiwan on May 29. The other case is a 24-year-old businessman based in Manhattan. He arrived in Taiwan on Monday.
■HEALTH
Minister wants screening
Department of Health (DOH) Minister Yeh Ching-chuan (葉金川) said yesterday that Taiwan should retain its policy of screening new migrant workers for hepatitis B, given that most work in close contact with their employers. Yeh was referring to a recent decision by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to revoke the policy of testing workers for hepatitis B on arrival in Taiwan. The center revoked the regulation based on the consideration that the disease can only be transmitted via blood or body fluids. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Hou Tsai-feng (侯彩鳳) said the cancelation of hepatitis B testing of new migrant workers would put the country’s citizens at risk.
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