A check-in loophole at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport allowed a female Canadian citizen of Chinese descent to breach security and enter restricted areas for more than 40 hours earlier this week, the Aviation Police Office said yesterday.
The woman, identified only by her surname Chen ((陳), came to Taiwan late last month on a backpacking trip, but was deported on Tuesday evening via a Hong Kong-bound flight after she was found to have used someone else's boarding pass to enter a controlled area the previous day.
An aviation police officer who spoke on condition of anonymity said initial investigations showed that Chen was scheduled to leave Taiwan on June 16, but went to the airport on Monday and managed to secure a boarding pass under someone else's name at a self-〝service check-in kiosk installed by an airline at the airport. She then entered a controlled area and walked around before checking in at the airport's transit hotel for an overnight stay, the official said.
Chen was not located until after the air carrier discovered she had not boarded the plane and reported the case to the aviation police. She was asked to explain how she acquired her boarding pass and managed to pass immigration. From her account, aviation police authorities learned of the loophole in the airline's online check-in system.
The officer said the automated system mistakenly issued Chen a boarding pass under the name of a passenger also surnamed Chen. As the online check-in system was not linked to the check-in counter, two boarding passes were issued for the same passenger.
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