■ PUBLIC SERVICES
No recycling over holidays
The Lunar New Year holiday means that garbage collection will be halted for three to four days starting on Sunday in most counties and cities. The Environmental Protection Administration said residents in Taipei County and Taipei and Kaohsiung cities can expect to see garbage trucks back on the road starting next Wednesday. Recycling trucks in Taipei City will resume on Thursday, as will garbage collection in Taichung City and County. Garbage collection in Keelung and Tainan cities, along with Keelung, Miaoli, Tainan, Kaohsiung, Pingtung, Hualien, Taitung, Kinmen, Penghu and Lianchiang counties, will resume next Wednesday, with some variation between townships. In other parts of the country, collection will resume mostly on Thursday. Residents in a few rural districts may have to wait until Feb. 22 before services return to normal intervals. The agency asked residents to cut down on waste over the holiday period so cleaning crews could better cope with the heavier load after service resumption. Detailed information on garbage collection times can be found on the agency’s Web site: ecolife.epa.gov.tw.
■ SOCIETY
Celebrity’s son detained
TV celebrity Chen Kai-lun’s (陳凱倫) son, Chen Jui (陳銳), will be detained at least until the end of the Lunar New Year holiday in a case involving campus gangsters, Shilin District prosecutors said yesterday. Prosecutors said major accomplices in the case had not been arrested, while the crimes Chen Jui had allegedly committed were serious and there was a risk that he would collude with witnesses if released. The celebrity’s son was arrested last month along with dozens of senior high school, vocational school and college students believed to be part of campus gangster groups. Twelve were suspected leaders of groups recruited by the notorious Bamboo Union gang. Most were recruited as leaders of gambling rings to attract “customers” to gamble at online casinos under the cover of an information technology firm.
■ CRIME
Alleged con artist arrested
An 82-year-old man was arrested for allegedly conning people out of thousands of dollars by posing as a relative of the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), police said yesterday. Deng Wen-shih (鄧文實) obtained NT$4.55 million (US$142,000) from at least two people by claiming he needed the money to release US$9 million frozen in a British bank, the Criminal Investigation Bureau said. Deng, who has a record of fraud and theft, claimed to be a relative of Deng Xiaoping to appear more credible and even had a forged photograph of himself posing with the late Chinese patriarch.
■ CRIME
Pair held in Virgin Islands
A Taiwanese couple is in federal custody in the US Virgin Islands on charges of illegally importing hundreds of kilograms of black coral. Ivan Chu and his wife, Gloria, of Taipei waived their right to appear at a Tuesday hearing in a US District Court on charges that they violated the Lacey Act, a federal wildlife protection law. A grand jury indictment alleges an unidentified St Thomas merchant had illegally bought US$50,000 in black coral from the couple since December 2008. Black coral is a fragile organism that attaches itself to rocks in deep ocean water. The animal’s skeleton is used in jewelry and sculptures.
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
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
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