Three Taiwanese and one Chinese have been arrested in the central Philippines for illegally possessing dangerous drugs, police in the Philippines said in a report yesterday.
Police in Kalibo in Aklan province said the three Taiwanese — surnamed Hu, aged 30, Sun, 39, and Wang, 29, — and one Chinese were taken into custody on Saturday after a warrant was issued for their arrest.
They were wanted on suspicion of violating Section 11 of the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002 and are being detained in Kalibo prison, the police said.
It has been recommended that the four suspects be released on 200,000 peso (US$3,962) bail, the report said.
The report did not specify what drugs the suspects were accused of possessing.
All three were implicated in another case in the Philippines: They were among 17 Taiwanese arrested on Boracay on Aug. 22 last year in a sting operation after police arrested a Taiwanese attempting to sell amphetamines.
When police went to his residence, they came across telephones, computers and a list of potential fraud victims. Sixteen Taiwanese and eight Chinese in the house were also arrested.
According to a statement from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in the Philippines in Manila at the time, the 17 Taiwanese said they went to Boracay on a working holiday, but further investigation found that 15 of them had previously been convicted of murder, drug-running, robbery, forgery and obstruction of official duties.
In other news, on Saturday night two Singaporean women were discovered carrying nearly NT$998,000 (US$32,811) in cash at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport without having declared it, and saw most of the money seized by customs authorities.
The two — a 33-year-old surnamed Chen and a 27-year-old surnamed Soh — were about to board a flight leaving Taiwan when customs inspectors at an X-ray checkpoint discovered the money in one of their handbags, airport police said.
Customs officials returned NT$100,000 to each of the women, but seized the remainder.
The women said that they had no knowledge of Taiwan’s new regulations covering currencies carried by inboard and outbound travelers.
An amendment to the Money Laundering Control Act (洗錢防制法) that took effect on June 28 stipulates that passengers entering or leaving Taiwan with more than NT$100,000, 20,000 Chinese yuan or foreign currency worth more than US$10,000 in cash have to declare it.
Undeclared currencies, as well as certain amounts of gold, or objects that could be used for laundering money can all be confiscated, the act states.
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