■ Crime
Bounty on fugitives raised
The cash reward for infor-mation leading to the arrest of prominent fugitives will be raised from the NT$1 million (US$29,410) to NT$10 million to give people more incentive to come forward, Premier Yu Shyi-kun said yesterday. Yu told lawmakers that the reward program is expected to be put into force in one week to facilitate apprehension of former Kaohsiung City Council speaker Chu An-hsiung (朱安雄), former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Wu Tse-yuan (伍澤元) and others. Yu said foreign nationals and governments, including that of China, would be eligible to receive the rewards. Chu was convicted of vote-buying. Wu was convicted of corruption in 1996.
■ Government
Control Yuan slams MOTC
Members of the Control Yuan imposed corrective mea-sures on the Ministry of Transportation and Com-munications yesterday for improperly handling of the release of shares of Chung-hua Telecom to public investors. "The ministry failed to carry out the share release of Chunghua Tele-com according to a plan mapped out by the govern-ment, which emphasized that the release must be based upon the principle of fair-ness to public investors," Control Yuan members said in their decision. They ruled that the ministry's derelic-tion of duty allowed key businesspeople to dominate the share release last December.
■ Taipei County
More people, less cash
Rapid population growth has aggravated the financial difficulties of the Taipei County Government, an official said yesterday. Lo Ching-hsio (駱清秀), director of the Department of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, told a county government meeting that over the past six years, the population has increased by 250,000 to 3.67 million, pushing up annual government spending from NT$63.2 billion (US$1.86 billion) in 1998 to NT$89.7 billion this year, or a hike of 42 percent. The spending increase and the decrease in tax revenues have boosted government debt to NT$56 billion, he said.
■ Health
SARS scare rebuffed by CDC
A person who recently returned from China was briefly suspected of being the first case of suspected SARS this fall, the Chinese-language media reported
late last night. The uniden-
tified person sought treat-ment at a private hospital
in Kaohsiung after suffering from a fever for two days,
a typical symptom of SARS. The hospital referred the patient to a municipal hos-pital for further treatment last night, triggering a panic among other patients at
the facility and their families. But a senior Center for Disease Control official
said that no new cases of SARS have been reported
to the center so far. "There
is no reported case of SARS in Kaohsiung. If there were such case, we would have reported it to the World Health Organization," said Shih Wen-yi (施文儀), the center's deputy director general.
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
US President Donald Trump said "it’s up to" Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be "very unhappy" with a change in the "status quo," the New York Times said in an interview published yesterday. Xi "considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing," Trump told the newspaper on Wednesday. "But I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that," he added. "I hope he doesn’t do that." Trump made the comments in
Tourism in Kenting fell to a historic low for the second consecutive year last year, impacting hotels and other local businesses that rely on a steady stream of domestic tourists, the latest data showed. A total of 2.139 million tourists visited Kenting last year, down slightly from 2.14 million in 2024, the data showed. The number of tourists who visited the national park on the Hengchun Peninsula peaked in 2015 at 8.37 million people. That number has been below 2.2 million for two years, although there was a spike in October last year due to multiple long weekends. The occupancy rate for hotels
A cold surge advisory was today issued for 18 cities and counties across Taiwan, with temperatures of below 10°C forecast during the day and into tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. New Taipei City, Taipei, Taoyuan and Hsinchu, Miaoli and Yilan counties are expected to experience sustained temperatures of 10°C or lower, the CWA said. Temperatures are likely to temporarily drop below 10°C in most other areas, except Taitung, Pingtung, Penghu and Lienchiang (Matsu) counties, CWA data showed. The cold weather is being caused by a strong continental cold air mass, combined with radiative cooling, a process in which heat escapes from
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