Aside from being a toy that entertains children and adults alike, the iconic yellow rubber duck now has a new function: as a lucky charm for gamblers.
The Jhunglu Branch (中路) of the Taoyuan County Police Bureau said that it discovered that the bathtime toys were being used as charms when it raided a gambling video center on Chenggung Road yesterday, arresting two men alleged to have managed the center and several customers.
Police officers posing as a couple interested in gambling contacted a man surnamed Cheng (鄭) to inquire about the center. Cheng agreed to meet the couple and take them to the gambling den.
Photo: CNA
Another man, surnamed Huang (黃), met the couple at the center and explained to them how to pay to gamble there. It was then that the undercover officers noticed nine duckies arranged in a triangle on a table, each with the Chinese character zhao (招) painted on their chest and a number on their head. Zhao means “to attract” or “to bring in” in Chinese.
Huang told the couple that the rubber toys are becoming increasingly popular as good luck tokens, so the center’s management had decided to put nine of them on display to boost their customers’ fortunes.
Huang also said that some customers believe that having a duck nearby would help them suppress the gambling machines so they could win, because the Chinese word for “duck” sounds exactly the same as another Chinese word that means “to suppress” (壓).
The rubber duckies were in high demand, with the ones numbered five, six and eight the most popular because “five” is a homonym for “to have” (有) in Hoklo — commonly known as Taiwanese— while six and eight are considered to be lucky numbers, he told the officers.
When he noticed that the police were outside, Huang asked the six gamblers in the center to move to another room and hid the gambling machines’ circuit boards in the ceiling, police said. He asked the customers to say that they were there to drink tea if the officers outside came in to search the place, the couple said.
The undercover policewoman then opened the door and her colleagues raided the center, confiscating 20 gambling machines and about NT$10,000.
The case is being handled by the Taoyuan District Prosecutors’ Office, which will probe charges of illegal gambling.
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