SOCIETY
Lantern festivals scheduled
The first of two Pingsi Sky Lantern Festivals is to take place during the Lantern Festival in New Taipei City on March 2, featuring lantern launches, performances and other activities, the city’s Tourism and Travel Department said yesterday. The festival is to take place at Shifen Sky Lantern Square from 5:30pm to 8:30pm, and is to feature eight launches of lanterns, as well as stations staffed by Sanrio-themed mascots. Participants interested in launching a lantern that evening can get a free coupon from event planners, starting at 10am. New Taipei City authorities are partnering this year with the local branch of Sanrio Co, the Japanese company behind Hello Kitty and other popular cartoon characters. The second festival is scheduled on Sept. 24 during the Mid-Autumn Festival.
CRIME
Bali detains Taiwanese
Eight Taiwanese suspects in a cross-border fraud ring who were recently arrested by Indonesian authorities remained detained on Bali yesterday, while 55 Chinese members of the ring were returned to China, Indonesian police said. The Taiwanese are suspected members of a telecom fraud ring that also includes 55 Chinese, four Indonesians and one Malaysian. They were tracked down by Indonesian law enforcement officials at four locations in Bali on Jan. 11 and accused of swindling money from people in Taiwan and China. Taiwan’s representative office in Jakarta was reported to be in talks with the Indonesian authorities, in the hope that the men can be returned to Taiwan.
CRIME
Japan jails Taiwanese
A Taiwanese man was on Thursday given a 25-year sentence and fined ￥10 million (US$91,000) by the Naha district court on the charge of masterminding the attempted smuggling of illicit drugs into Japan. The 45-year-old man, whose identity was not revealed, was caught while trying to move 597kg of methamphetamines to his yacht from an unidentified ship in the East China Sea in May 2016. “This is an organized criminal act that is of a magnitude that would have inevitably caused harm to Japan,” the presiding judge in the court in Okinawa’s capital said. Two other Taiwanese involved in the case were each sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined ￥5 million in November last year.
TRAFFIC
New route to partly open
The first section of the Suhua Highway (蘇花公路) improvement project, a road that cuts through the mountains along the east coast, is to open on Monday at 4pm, in time for surging travel demand around the Lunar New Year holiday, the Directorate-General of Highways (DGH) said yesterday. The 9.7km stretch passes from Yilan County’s Suao (蘇澳) to Hualien County’s Dongao (東澳), the DGH said. The new road includes the Suao Tunnel, the Baimi Bridge, the Yongle Bridge, the Dongao Tunnel and the Dongyue Tunnel, after which it rejoins the original highway. The first section is expected to be safer and faster than the existing road, taking 10 minutes instead of 30, the DGH said, but added that commercial vehicles are currently not allowed on the route. There is to be a maximum speed limit of 60kph and a ban on overtaking vehicles. The full Suhua Highway overhaul project is to be completed by the end of next year, which would reduce travel time between Yilan and Hualien from about two-and-a-half hours to 80 minutes, the transport ministry said.
AGING: While Japan has 22 submarines, Taiwan only operates four, two of which were commissioned by the US in 1945 and 1946, and transferred to Taiwan in 1973 Taiwan would need at least 12 submarines to reach modern fleet capabilities, CSBC Corp, Taiwan chairman Chen Cheng-hung (陳政宏) said in an interview broadcast on Friday, citing a US assessment. CSBC is testing the nation’s first indigenous defense submarine, the Hai Kun (海鯤, Narwhal), which is scheduled to be delivered to the navy next month or in July. The Hai Kun has completed torpedo-firing tests and is scheduled to undergo overnight sea trials, Chen said on an SET TV military affairs program. Taiwan would require at least 12 submarines to establish a modern submarine force after assessing the nation’s operational environment and defense
A white king snake that frightened passengers and caused a stir on a Taipei MRT train on Friday evening has been claimed by its owner, who would be fined, Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC) said yesterday. A person on Threads posted that he thought he was lucky to find an empty row of seats on Friday after boarding a train on the Bannan (Blue) Line, only to spot a white snake with black stripes after sitting down. Startled, he jumped up, he wrote, describing the encounter as “terrifying.” “Taipei’s rat control plan: Release snakes on the metro,” one person wrote in reply, referring
The coast guard today said that it had disrupted "illegal" operations by a Chinese research ship in waters close to the nation and driven it away, part of what Taipei sees a provocative pattern of China's stepped up maritime activities. The coast guard said that it on Thursday last week detected the Chinese ship Tongji (同濟號), which was commissioned only last year, 29 nautical miles (54km) southeast of the southern tip of Taiwan, although just outside restricted waters. The ship was observed lowering ropes into the water, suspected to be the deployment of scientific instruments for "illegal" survey operations, and the coast
Taiwan’s two cases of hantavirus so far this year are on par with previous years’ case numbers, and the government is coordinating rat extermination work, so there should not be any outbreaks, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director-General Philip Lo (羅一鈞) said today in an interview with the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper). An increase in rat sightings in Taipei and New Taipei City has raised concerns about the spread of hantavirus, as rats can carry the disease. In January, a man in his 70s who lived in Taipei’s Daan District (大安) tested positive posthumously for hantavirus, Taiwan’s
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