■Health
Alcohol ban for Aborigines
In order to battle the counterfeit rice wine problem, the Council of Indigenous Peoples yesterday morning announced to a ban on Aborigines drinking on the streets or in stores in the daytime, Chinese-language media reported yesterday. The council has informed offices of Aboriginal townships and villages about the new regulation. It has also demanded that all township and village chiefs set good examples by no longer using rice wine as a liquor. Almost 30 people nationwide have been poisoned by bootleg rice wines over the past week, many of them Aborigines.
■ Transportation
Lin backs higher speed limit
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications is considering raising the speed limit on some sections of the Sun Yat-sen Freeway from 100kph to 120kph. At a meeting on traffic safety yesterday, Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Ling-san (林陵三) said many sections of the freeway have been expanded to three lanes and can handle the higher speeds. The speed limits, which had been 70kph, 90kph and 100kph, depending on the section of freeway, were raised to 100kph in all sections last December.
■ Labor dispute
Vietnamese workers beaten
Hundreds of Vietnamese workers clashed with Taiwanese bosses at a furniture factory in the southern province of Binh Duong, officials said yesterday. Police were mobilized to break up the violence, which flared when 30 bosses attacked workers who tried to join striking colleagues outside the factory, union official Nguyen Van Khuong said. Chen Chung Hoan, general director of Doanh Duc factory, made an official apology on Wednesday for the behavior of his officials and pledged to deal firmly with wrongdoers.
■ Elections
TSU supports clean vote
The TSU yesterday threw its support behind a "clean election promotion campaign." TSU Chairman Huang Chu-wen (黃主文) expressed his party's support for the campaign launched by a non-government organization headed by Chai Sung-lin (柴松林), a noted sociologist and promoter of clean politics. Huang said vote-buying and violence eroded Taiwan's young democracy. "Therefore, all political parties and individual politicians should support the clean election campaign," he noted. All seven of the TSU's candidates for the Taipei city council elections also signed up to support the campaign.
■ Haiti
Taiwan-funded road opens
A highway linking the Haitian capital's international airport to the city's downtown district has been completed with funds donated by Taiwan. Taiwan's government has donated more than US$8 million for construction of the 7.26km highway linking Port-au-Prince's downtown to its international airport, which is Haiti's main gateway. The first two sections of the highway were built by a Haitian contractor and the remaining five sections were all constructed by Overseas Construction Co, which is partly owned by Taiwan business groups. Overseas Construction hosted a party on Wednesday to mark the completion of the project. More than 200 people attended the ceremony.
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
IN FULL SWING: Recall drives against lawmakers in Hualien, Taoyuan and Hsinchu have reached the second-stage threshold, the campaigners said Campaigners in a recall petition against Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Yen Kuan-heng (顏寬恒) in Taichung yesterday said their signature target is within sight, and that they need a big push to collect about 500 more signatures from locals to reach the second-stage threshold. Recall campaigns against KMT lawmakers Johnny Chiang (江啟臣), Yang Chiung-ying (楊瓊瓔) and Lo Ting-wei (羅廷瑋) are also close to the 10 percent threshold, and campaigners are mounting a final push this week. They need about 800 signatures against Chiang and about 2,000 against Yang. Campaigners seeking to recall Lo said they had reached the threshold figure over the
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