Two men died after a blaze broke out yesterday afternoon at an unregistered private nursing facility in Taipei’s Neihu District (內湖).
The Taipei Fire Department said that after a team broke into the house, three men were found in their beds, all of whom had burns and had inhaled smoke.
“No one else was found at the scene,” it said, adding that the fire could have been caused by overheading equipment, as burned wires were found.
Photo copied by CNA
A 70-year-old surnamed Chuang (莊) and a 59-year-old surnamed Liu (劉) were confirmed dead at a nearby hospital, while a 69-year-old surnamed Chen (陳) was in critical condition, police said.
The nursing home was not registered, Taipei Social Welfare Department Director-General Chou Yu-hsiu (周榆修) said, adding that an unregistered long-term care facility can be fined NT$60,000 to NT$300,000 under the Long-Term Care Services Act (長期照顧服務法).
The owners could also be punished for negligence under the Senior Citizens Welfare Act (老人福利法), officials said.
A nearby resident who did not want to be named said the nursing home has been operational for one to two years, and the owner never talked to her neighbors.
Department of Social Welfare officials had visited the house once, but the owner refused to allow them inside and let a dog out to scare them, the resident said.
The owner, a 58-year-old woman surnamed Ting (丁), was reportedly monitoring the building from a nearby coffee shop when she saw the flames and fled, but was later picked up by police and taken for questioning.
Taipei Deputy Mayor Vivian Huang (黃珊珊) said that the city would reach out to the families of the victims, and would hold the owner accountable, she said.
Additional reporting by Cheng Ching-yi and Wang kuan-jen
NO-LIMITS PARTNERSHIP: ‘The bottom line’ is that if the US were to have a conflict with China or Russia it would likely open up a second front with the other, a US senator said Beijing and Moscow could cooperate in a conflict over Taiwan, the top US intelligence chief told the US Senate this week. “We see China and Russia, for the first time, exercising together in relation to Taiwan and recognizing that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn’t,” US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a US Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing on Thursday. US Senator Mike Rounds asked Haines about such a potential scenario. He also asked US Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has