CRIME
Customs seizes fake drugs
Customs authorities confiscated a package of drugs from China containing two banned pharmaceutical products disguised as a Japanese constipation remedy brand, the Food and Drug Administration said on Wednesday. The counterfeit medicine looks almost the same as the genuine product, but contains a combination of the banned substances sibutramine and phenolphthalein, which are carcinogenic and could be fatal to humans, administration official Dai Hsueh-yung (戴雪詠) said. Sibutramine is the active ingredient in Reductil, a weight-loss drug that was banned because it increases the risk of heart attack, stroke and even death, while phenolphthalein is an ingredient once found in over-the-counter laxatives until it was labeled as a potential carcinogen.
IMMIGRATION
Indonesian dies in escape
A female Indonesian migrant worker yesterday died after she jumped from the third floor of a building and sustained head injuries during a raid, the National Immigration Agency said. The Taoyuan office of the agency’s Northern Taiwan Administration Corps received a tip-off on Wednesday night of a number of absconded migrant workers at a factory in the city’s Tayuan District (大園). During the raid, immigration officers found 17 allegedly illegal migrant workers, four of whom tried to flee, including the female worker in her 30s identified as Danisah, they said. She showed no vital signs before arriving at a hospital, where she was pronounced dead by doctors after failed attempts to resuscitate her. Several others sustained minor injuries. Authorities have begun an investigation of the incident and have notified the employers of the migrant workers. To ensure the security of the upcoming Summer Universiade in Taipei, immigration authorities said they have stepped up inspections of large public places and possible hideouts for absconded migrant workers.
SOCIETY
Cost of living 34th highest
Taiwan’s cost of living index was the 34th-highest among 115 nations in a mid-year reported released by global online data Web site Numbeo. The online database determines a nation’s cost of living index by comparing rent, groceries and restaurant indices with local purchasing power. The report showed that Bermuda has replaced Switzerland as having the highest cost of living, followed by Iceland in third, Norway and the Bahamas. Denmark, the US Virgin Islands, Japan, Israel and Singapore rounded out the top 10 nations on the list.
ENTERTAINMENT
Online videos a part of life
Taiwanese spend an average of 7.3 hours per week watching online video programming, with one in four spending more than 12 hours per week, an Institute for Information Industry survey found. Watching online videos has become part of the daily life of people younger than 44, the survey found, with 25 percent of respondents in the 25 to 34 age group spending more than 12 hours per week and 56 percent of those in the 35 to 44 demographic spending more than five hours per week. The best-known brand name for online video is iQiyi, with 94.7 percent of those polled knowing the name, followed by KKTV at 75 percent, the Innovative DigiTech-Enabled Applications and Service Institute said. The survey found that Netflix enjoys the highest customer loyalty, with 42.3 percent of respondents expressing interest in continuing to subscribe, followed by Taiwan Mobile’s myVideo service at 31.3 percent.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
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