Authorities in Taiwan and the US recently busted an international prostitution ring, and arrested three Taiwanese allegedly involved in trafficking women from Taiwan to the US and other countries.
The Criminal Investigation Bureau in September last year received information from the American Institute in Taiwan on Taiwanese women allegedly involved in prostitution in the US, Lee Yang-chi (李泱輯), an officer in the bureau’s International Criminal Affairs Division, told a news conference in Taipei on Thursday.
The bureau’s investigation led to the detention of three Taiwanese in Taipei earlier this month, including the alleged ring leader, a 31-year-old woman surnamed Lin (林), Lee said. Investigators found a guidebook on US immigration procedures and accounting books at Lin’s residence, he added.
The three allegedly used social media to recruit women, promising high salaries, Lee said.
About 50 women, aged 25 to 35, were sent to California to engage in prostitution from 2018 to early last year, investigators said.
According to Lin’s records, the women received about NT$7,000 per customer, investigators said.
The ring had also sent women to Canada and Australia, Lee said.
The detainees, who have posted bail of NT$50,000 to NT$150,000, would likely be charged for breaching the Act on Offenses Against Sexual Morality (妨害風化罪), Lee said.
The Council of Agriculture yesterday signed a Taiwan-Australia Agricultural Cooperation Implementation clause to open a new export market for the nation’s pineapple crop. The clause is an addition to existing cooperation measures, it said. China on Friday last week abruptly announced that it would suspend pineapple imports from Taiwan starting on Monday, on grounds that it had on multiple occasions discovered “harmful organisms” in shipments of the fruit. The public and private sectors have since joined hands to purchase the local fruit to help the nation’s pineapple farmers. Canberra has requested that all pineapples for export to Australia have their crown buds removed,
A Tainan taxi driver is the Taiwanese with the longest name, after he last month changed it so that it now contains 25 characters, the Anping District Household Registration Office said. The 47-year-old man, formerly known as Huang Hsin-hsiang (黃鑫翔), applied for the name change on Feb. 26, in the hope that it would bring him good luck. His new name starts with Huang Da-lan (黃大嵐) and adds another 22 characters, meaning “Huang Da-lan is the blessed darling and sweetheart of the god of joy, god of wealth, god of misfortune, god of Earth and all the gods,” it said. With
POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS: As China attempted to promote its national image through humanitarian aid, its targets include New Southbound Policy countries, an expert said China’s “vaccine diplomacy,” which has become central to its foreign policy this year, might hamper Taiwan’s efforts to build relations with developing countries, an expert said. “China, as one of the few countries other than the United Kingdom and the United States to have produced a COVID-19 vaccine, will certainly use that as a diplomatic tool,” said Kung Shan-son (龔祥生), an assistant research fellow at the government-funded Institute for National Defense and Security Research. Beijing’s major goals in its “vaccine diplomacy” are to promote its national image through humanitarian aid and to solidify its relations with countries that are included in its
Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group might have lost its right to distribute the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19 and the ability to fulfill a contract in Taiwan, civic groups Taiwan Citizen Front and the Economic Democracy Union said yesterday. In a radio interview on Feb. 17, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), head of the Central Epidemic Command Center, said that last year, Taiwan was close to signing a contract to buy doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but that the deal was halted at the last moment, with some speculating that Chinese interference was to blame. On Monday last week, the center