CRIME
Fraud ring suspects charged
More than a dozen suspects were on Monday indicted on organized crime and fraud charges for allegedly defrauding Chinese women on dating sites, the Taichung District Prosecutors’ Office said. The 13 suspects were allegedly part of a group based in Taichung that targeted Chinese nationals, the office said in a statement. They were allegedly led by a 23-year-old Taiwanese man surnamed Yang (楊), who began hiring locals in 2017 to join China-based dating Web sites to target women. Once they got to know their potential victims, they persuaded the women to make wire transfers for purported investments, prosecutors said. The ring’s members allegedly defrauded six Chinese victims of about NT$2.39 million (US$77,509), the office said. They were arrested at their operational bases in Taichung’s Xitun (西屯) and Nantun (南屯) districts in raids carried out by local police.
PUBLIC SAFETY
Firefighter eligibility to grow
The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday last week approved revised regulations to allow foreign nationals residing in Taiwan to volunteer as firefighters. The new regulations would be officially promulgated and become effective after internal procedures are completed, the ministry said in a statement. The revisions make provisions for foreign nationals, including people from China, Macau and Hong Kong, who are willing to undergo the necessary training at local fire departments to qualify as volunteer firefighters, it said. They could make positive contributions to firefighting and fire prevention efforts, as Taiwan has limited human resources in that area, it added. The new rules would apply to legal foreign residents who have a clean police record, the ministry 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
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