POLITICS
Vote-buying arrests made
Greater Kaohsiung judges yesterday ordered three people detained on suspicion of vote-buying for an Aboriginal candidate. Prosecutors said that Ko Wu-ta (柯武達), acting director of the Namasiya District (那瑪夏) office in Greater Kaohsiung, was suspected of engaging in vote-buying between October and November last year. They said that Ko had asked Chou Wei-ping (周維平) to deliver cash to Chou Hsiou-mei (周秀美), an elementary-school principal who distributed the money to several people — including a man named Lu Bao-shen (盧保生) — to conduct vote-buying for the candidate. Prosecutors said Lu was suspected of bribing a number of voters, giving them NT$2,000 each. Chou Hsiou-mei is now in detention. Meanwhile, in Hualien County, nine people from Sioulin Township (秀林) were arrested on suspicion of being involved in vote-buying. Prosecutors seized NT$300,000 in cash and a number of health food products from one of the suspects’ residence. They said the nine suspects had handed out between NT$2,000 and NT$2,500 in cash to bribe voters. Hualien District Prosecutors’ Office head Lin Ching-tsung (林慶宗) said prosecutors had received more than 50 complaints about vote-buying, of which five were “very suspicious” and were being investigated. To avoid affecting the elections, the Ministry of Justice has asked prosecutors not to name candidates being investigated for vote-buying.
SCIENCE
Expert saves NT$6.8m
A forensic expert said yesterday she saved a total of NT$6.8 million (US$226,560) in damaged banknotes after months of effort, the largest single collection of such notes in Taiwan. Liu Hui-fen (劉蕙芬), who has worked for the Investigation Bureau for 30 years and has trained herself to be a “jigsaw expert” since 2006, accepted NT$7.2 million water-damaged notes in May last year from a man surnamed Huang (黃) living in Greater Tainan. Liu first used an ultrasonic vibrator on the banknotes and managed to recover NT$1.85 million. Another month of using the vibrator recovered NT$2.5 million more. Liu then spent five months to restore NT$2.45 million. Huang, who lost about NT$400,000 in unrecoverable notes, expressed gratitude to Liu. The bureau dealt with 12 such cases in 2006, when the service first began to be offered, and by last year it dealt with 83 cases, said Hu Hsing-yung (胡興勇), a bureau section chief.
SOCIETY
Free firecracker CDs
The Taipei City Government is giving away free CDs of exploding firecrackers ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday as part of efforts to avoid air pollution. It has long been a tradition to set off firecrackers to celebrate the beginning of Lunar New Year. However, the smoke causes air pollution, while the paper left behind also pollutes the environment, city environmental officials said yesterday. The city government has prepared the CDs for people who want to have a festive atmosphere without disturbing their neighbors or polluting, the officials said. The CDs are available from the Department of Environment Protection, or can be obtained from the Web site of the Environment Protection Administration at http://ivyl.epa.gov.tw/noise/DD/D-01.htm, they said.
BUSINESS
CPC inks deal for LNG
CPC Corp, Taiwan has signed a long-term contract to buy natural gas from Australian supplier Ichthys LNG. CPC said it planned to buy 1.59 million tonnes of liquified natural gas (LNG) annually for 15 years, beginning in 2017 at the earliest.
DIPLOMACY
Liu sentencing hearing set
The sentencing hearing for Jacqueline Liu (劉姍姍), the Taiwanese diplomat who has been detained on labor fraud charges since November, is scheduled for Jan. 27. Don Ledford, a spokesman for the US Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri, confirmed the sentencing date in an e-mail discussing Liu’s case. Liu, the former director-general of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Kansas City, Missouri, was arrested by the FBI on Nov. 10 on charges of underpaying and overworking two Filipino housekeepers. After she was arrested and detained, her lawyer negotiated a plea bargain agreement under which Liu would plead guilty to the charges and then be sentenced to time served and pay US$80,044 in restitution to the two victims before being deported. US District Judge David Gregory Kays will decide at the sentencing hearing whether the court accepts the agreement.
CRIME
Heist suspects arrested
Five suspects have been arrested in connection with a heist last week in northern Taiwan, police said yesterday. On Monday last week, three employees of Taiwan Business Bank’s Houli (后里) branch in Greater Taichung were robbed by a gang after they collected NT$1.27 million (US$42,370) in cash from a restaurant near the Liyutan Reservoir in neighboring Miaoli County to deposit in the bank. On their way back to work, their car was stopped by a group headed by the alleged leader, surnamed Chiu (邱), in a staged traffic accident and they were robbed at gunpoint. Chiu, in his 50s, is said to have planned the heist after learning that the bank sends staff to collect cash from the restaurant on a regular basis. Chiu and four accomplices were arrested, but one suspect was still at large, police said.
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