CRIME
Alleged con artists arrested
Police have arrested 39 suspects as part of a crackdown jointly launched by authorities in Taiwan, China and Indonesia on an alleged cross-border fraud ring based in Bali, Indonesia. The 39 suspects, including five Chinese, were sent to Taiwan aboard two flights late on Sunday, the Criminal Investigation Division of the Taipei City Police Department said. The suspects allegedly pretended to be from the Chinese government and a Chinese bank and asked their victims to remit money to certain bank accounts under the pretext that their credit card information had been stolen and they had to transfer funds to help with the investigation. Police said the alleged gang was made up of 34 Taiwanese and five Chinese nationals.
TRANSPORTATION
Wuta Tunnel lane finished
The Suhua Highway improvement project moved one step closer to completion on Saturday last week when construction of the southbound lane of the Wuta Tunnel was finished. The 464m tunnel in Nanao Township (南澳), Yilan County, is one of eight tunnels along the coastal highway that leads to Hualien County and is the third to be completed. Premier Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國) has said that 63 percent of the highway improvement project involves tunnel-boring, which is a challenging task because of the fragile geology of the area. The project is scheduled to be finished in 2017. Its three new road sections will replace the narrow coastal road that now links Yilan and Hualien counties. The new sections will run from Suao to Dongao Township (東澳) in Yilan, from Yilan’s Nanao to Heping Township (和平) in Hualien, and from Heping to Chongde Township (崇德), which is also in Hualien, covering a total of 38.8km.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift