Seventeen people yesterday were detained after raids in New Taipei City’s Sanchong District (三重) on Saturday uncovered an alleged mahjong gambling den, authorities said.
A man surnamed Tsai (蔡) owned the club operated by the Chinese Mahjong Sports Association’s Sanchong chapter, which raked in about NT$300,000 per month in gambling profits, Sanchong Police Precinct Chief Wang Wen-tse (王文澤) said.
Tsai is to be charged with illegal gambling, while the other people are to be charged with breaches of the Social Order Maintenance Act (社會秩序維護法), Wang said.
“The association allegedly used the pretext of promoting the quintessential Chinese cultural heritage of mahjong as a cover for illegal gambling. Our officers conducted surveillance at the location under Tsai’s management for more than a month before Saturday’s raid busted the operation,” he said, adding that police checked identification and confiscated cash, betting tokens, money collection boxes and nine electronic mahjong machines.
“Police seized NT$35,000 in cash, which was the players’ betting money, and another NT$25,000 in cash, which we believe was the commission paid to the house,” he said.
When a player picked up a tile needed to win or collected a winning combination of tiles, they would place cash in the collection box to avoid having money change hands among the players, Wang 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