■ Crime
Police seize fake drug haul
A big haul of counterfeit medicine, including the prized weight-loss drug Reductil, intended for online sale in Taiwan, has been seized, the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) announced yesterday. CIB investigators raided the homes of two men, surnamed Wu and Chen, in Taichung and seized more than 5,000 tablets of counterfeit medicine. The haul included l2,000 tablets of the anti-obesity medicine Reductil (Sibutramine), 1,500 tablets of Viagra, 280 tablets of Cialis -- another drug for the treatment of erectile dysfunction -- and 1,600 other unknown pills. The investigators learned that the fake pills were manufactured in China and smuggled into Taiwan by people returning from China, intended for sale to Taiwanese customers via online transactions, CIB officials said.
■ Labor
Disabled to get more jobs
The Ministry of the Interior will draft revisions to the law that require more job openings for mentally or physically challenged individuals, Minister of the Interior Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) said. Under the terms of the Disabled People Protection Law (身心障礙者保護法), public agencies with a staff of more than 50 must have at least 2 percent of their staff include people with physical or mental disabilities. Meanwhile, private enterprises with a staff of more than 100 must ensure that at least 1 percent of their staffers are people with disabilities. As of the end of September, private and public agencies had employed a total of 45,400 disabled staffers, exceeding the mandatory minimum of 33,955. Su said the ministry plans to raise the disabled hiring ratio for public agencies to 3 percent.
■ Education
Taiwan, Ohio ink agreement
The Ministry of Education has signed a memorandum of cooperation with the US state of Ohio under which the state government will help recruit teachers to teach English in Taiwanese elementary schools, Taiwan officials said on Thursday. The Ohio government will also recruit Taiwanese teachers to teach Chinese in the state next year, according to Hsu Hui-wen (徐會文), chief of the cultural affairs division of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Chicago. Ohio is the second US state after Indiana to establish an educational cooperation agreement with Taiwan. Hsu said that according to the terms of the memorandum signed on Nov. 29, Ohio's Department of Education will help post a notice detailing Taiwan's plan to recruit teachers, with 15 openings available in the initial stage.
■ Sports
Kaohsiung in for 2011 games
A screening team of the National Council on Physical Fitness and Sports has selected Kaohsiung to represent the nation in the country's bid to host the 2011 World University Games. Council officials said that one of the government's major policies is to bid to host international athletic meets, noting that Taipei has been awarded the right to host the 2009 Deaflympic Games for athletes with hearing impairments, and that Kaohsiung has already been awarded the right to host the 2009 World Games. In the near future, they have set the goal of bidding to host the World University Games with the aim of accumulating more experience in sponsoring international events to achieve the eventual goals of bidding to host the 2018 Asian Games and the 2020 Olympic Games.
COLLABORATION: As TSMC is building an advanced wafer fab in Dresden, Germany, it needs to build a comprehensive supply chain in Europe, Joseph Wu said Taiwan is planning to team up with the Czech Republic to build a semiconductor cluster in the European country, National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) said on Friday. Wu, who led a Taiwanese delegation at the annual GLOBSEC Forum held in Prague from Friday to today, said in a news conference that Taiwan seeks to foster cooperation between Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) and its counterparts in Czechia. Such cooperation is expected to transform the country into one of the most important semiconductor clusters in Europe over the next three to five years, he added. As TSMC is building an advanced
A joint declaration by Pacific leaders was reissued yesterday morning with mentions of Taiwan removed after China slammed an earlier version as a “mistake” that “must be corrected.” After five days of talks in Tonga, a “cleared” communique was released on Friday that reaffirmed a 30-year-old agreement allowing Taiwan to take part in the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF). However, the wording immediately raised the ire of Chinese diplomats, who piled pressure on Pacific leaders to amend the document. The forum reissued the communique without explanation yesterday morning, conspicuously deleting the paragraph concerning the bloc’s “relations with Taiwan.” “It must be a
A tropical depression in waters east of the Philippines could develop into a tropical storm as soon as today and bring rainfall as it approaches, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday, while issuing heat warnings for 14 cities and counties. Weather model simulations show that there are still considerable differences in the path that the tropical depression is projected to take. It might pass through the Bashi Channel to the South China Sea or turn northeast and move toward the sea south of Japan, CWA forecaster Yeh Chih-chun (葉致均) said, adding that the uncertainty of its movement is still high,
TAIWANESE INNOVATION: The ‘Seawool’ fabric generates about NT$200m a year, with the bulk of it sourced by clothing brands operating in Europe and the US Growing up on Taiwan’s west coast where mollusk farming is popular, Eddie Wang saw discarded oyster shells transformed from waste to function — a memory that inspired him to create a unique and environmentally friendly fabric called “Seawool.” Wang remembered that residents of his seaside hometown of Yunlin County used discarded oyster shells that littered the streets during the harvest as insulation for their homes. “They burned the shells and painted the residue on the walls. The houses then became warm in the winter and cool in the summer,” the 42-year-old said at his factory in Tainan. “So I was
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