Police and justice officials yesterday were instructed by the premier’s office to enhance efforts to restrain organized crime after the Bamboo Union held a large, highly visible banquet at a hotel in Taipei on Monday, a Cabinet spokesman said.
The Bamboo Union — a self-described business association and allegedly Taiwan’s largest crime group — made headlines with the event at the Taipei Marriot, which featured a red-carpet entrance lined by 170 female greeters as a parade of luxury vehicles arrived.
Following the banquet’s extensive media coverage, the National Police Agency was told by Premier Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) to implement measures to discourage such public events, which cast Taiwan in a bad light and insult law enforcement authorities, Cabinet spokesman Lo Ping-cheng (羅秉成) told a news conference in Taipei.
Photo: CNA
Chen also told the Ministry of Justice to instruct the Taiwan High Prosecutors’ Office to enhance efforts to bolster measures to contain organized crime, Lo said.
Police should vigorously inspect businesses run by criminal gangs to determine any illegal activities and take swift action against the suspects, Lo cited the premier as saying.
Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安), commenting on the banquet, said that law enforcement authorities must not be challenged, and that he had instructed Taipei police to forcefully crack down on organized crime in the city.
The Taipei City Police Department has been instructed to create a task force to draft concrete measures to discourage criminal gangs, the police agency said on Wednesday.
About 200 officers on Wednesday evening inspected businesses suspected to be operated by or affiliated with criminal gangs in Taipei, and found three wanted fugitives, two of whom are suspected of fraud and one of forgery, Taipei City Police Commissioner Chang Jung-hsin (張榮興) said at Zhongshan Precinct that night.
The Taipei police department remains steadfast in its resolve to purge criminal gangs, it said in a statement.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching