CRIME
Woman faces trafficking trial
A Taiwanese woman has been charged with human trafficking after allegedly sending hundreds of Cambodians to work in slave-like conditions on fishing boats off the coast of Africa, police said yesterday. Lin Yu-shin, owner of the now-defunct Giant Ocean International Co, was arrested in Siem Reap, Cambodia, on Friday, said Chiv Phally of the Cambodian Ministry of the Interior’s human trafficking department. Lin, 53, has been charged by a Phnom Penh court, he said, adding that she has been under investigation since late 2011 when allegations first surfaced of Cambodian fishermen being made to work for up to 20 hours a day without pay. Lin’s firm allegedly began sending Cambodian workers to man trawlers off the coasts of South Africa, Mauritius and Senegal in 2009, as well as to work on boats near Japan, Fiji, Qatar, Malaysia and Singapore, Chiv Phally said. Leang Sam Nat, an investigative judge at the Phnom Penh Municipal Court, confirmed the charge and said Lin was being detained pending further investigation.
CHARITY
Quake donations at US$56m
Taiwan has donated NT$1.67 billion (US$56.02 million) so far toward relief efforts in the aftermath of the magnitude 7 earthquake that struck China’s Sichuan Province last month, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman Yang Yi (楊毅) said yesterday. Yang said that since April 20, donations from Taiwan had grown to about 348 million Chinese yuan (US$56 million). Taiwanese also donated 16.28 million yuan worth of relief materials, he added. Yang expressed “deep gratitude” on behalf of residents of the quake-stricken region for the donations. The earthquake left nearly 200 people dead and more than 12,000 injured, according to Chinese media reports.
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