Sat, Mar 17, 2007 page3

• Taiwan Quick Take

  • STAFF WRITER WITH AGENCIES
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  ■ Weather
  Another cold front hits

  Temperatures are expected to drop nationwide today after the arrival of another cold front last night, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday. The frontal system will continue to affect the weather and temperatures until Monday, forecasters said. Heavy rain is predicted in mountainous areas of Ilan and Hualien counties, with the biggest drops in temperature expected in the northern and northeastern parts of the country. The mercury will drop to around 15oC in the north, 15oC to 16oC in the central region and 17oC in the south, with showers in the mountainous areas in the southern, easter and central part of the country, the bureau said.

  ■ Crime

  Conspiring student jailed

  A Singaporean student who had been arrested in Taipei while conspiring to help a Chinese national pose as a Singaporean in order to board a US-bound plane was jailed for 10 weeks in Singapore, the Straits Times reported yesterday. Lee Ming Yong, 25, admitted working with the group in March last year to abet the impersonation. Li Qiao, the 19-year-old Chinese national, wanted to look for a job in Los Angeles, the paper reported, but her own Chinese passport would have made it difficult. The plan was for her to enter the US on a forged Singapore passport. Ng Wan Yin, 25, one of the Singaporean conspirators, and Li boarded the flight to Los Angeles, the court heard on Thursday. Ng then handed her boarding pass to Li and got off in Taipei. Taiwanese authorities caught Li and another Chinese national, Chen Danyan, 20, with their forged Singapore passports and stopped them from continuing to Los Angeles. Li and Chen were deported and dealt with in the city-state. Ng was jailed for two months earlier this year.

  ■ Society

  Students' waistlines growing

  The number of students enrolled at National Cheng Kung University in Tainan who are classified as overweight has increased over the past several years, with more than 20 percent of the freshmen last year being overweight, a survey released yesterday said. Only 15.9 percent of freshmen in 2002 had a body mass index (BMI) higher than 24 -- the threshold set by the university in defining an overweight student. The figure was 18.7 percent in 2003, 19.6 percent in 2004 and 18.6 percent in 2005. The BMI is defined as an individual's body weight divided by the square of their height. The WHO has defined a BMI of 18 to 24 as the optimal weight for an individual.

  ■ Society

  Man burns himself to death

  A Miaoli County man committed suicide on Thursday morning by lying on a gas stove with its burners cranked to maximum, the Chinese-language Apple Daily reported yesterday. Suffering from depression and insomnia, the 75-year-old man locked his wife in a bedroom in their son's apartment while the rest of the family was out and lay atop the kitchen's gas-fed stove, the report said. The man apparently held himself on the burners until the very end, as the flames burned off his clothes and left him with fatal third-degree burns all over his torso and limbs. The man was blackened on both his front and back, suggesting that he turned himself over during the self-charring, the police were quoted as saying. Sensing an emergency at hand, the wife phoned her son from within the locked room, who in turn called a neighbor to shut off the gas connection to his home. But by the time the gas was cut and the police arrived, the man had already burned to death, the report said.
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