Taiwan has agreed to freeze a bank account containing about US$16 million in allegedly laundered money linked to Mexican drug cartels, US officials said on Friday.
The action is the first time that Taiwan has helped in a significant asset seizure as part of a US-based criminal investigation, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency said.
On Wednesday, about 1,000 police staged dawn raids in Los Angeles, seizing about US$60 million in cash and arresting nine people in what was dubbed “Operation Fashion Police,” in the city’s garment district.
Police also executed dozens of search warrants on businesses suspected of using so-called “Black Market Peso Exchange” schemes to launder narcotics proceeds for groups including the notorious Sinaloa cartel.
The US$15.6 million seized in Taiwan is among assets police believe stem from the money-laundering operations. In addition, three homes in the LA area worth a combined US$10 million were ordered seized.
“This case ... clearly shows that the [US] Department of Homeland Security will follow the trail of criminal proceeds wherever it leads, whether it’s around the block or around the world,” US Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said.
“With the help of our Taiwanese law-enforcement partners, these seizures not only deny criminals their profits, they also disrupt their ability to further fund their criminal activity,” he added in a statement.
The Taiwanese seizure was finalized between the Homeland Security Investigations unit, the US Attorney’s Office in LA and the the Taiwanese Ministry of Justice, the ICE statement 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