Focus Taiwan
Date: 2015/07/28
By: Lee Hsin-Yin

Taipei, July 28 (CNA) Hail pelted down on parts of northern and eastern Taiwan on Tuesday afternoon during a period of extreme weather islandwide, the Central Weather Bureau said.

It said hailstones fell in Taipei, New Taipei, Taoyuan and Hualien, which also experienced torrential rain, strong wind gusts, thunder and lightning.

In New Taipei, marble-sized hailstones pounded the Banqiao area for about two minutes, from 2:43 p.m.-2:45 p.m., the bureau said.

Similar weather is likely on Wednesday due to a strong convective system over Taiwan, forecasters said.

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2015/07/28
By: Lee Hsin-Yin

Taipei, July 28 (CNA) An earthquake with a magnitude of 4.4 on the Richter scale shook

northern Taiwan at 2:59 p.m. Tuesday, according to the Central Weather Bureau.

The epicenter of the earthquake was about 42.3 kilometers southwest of Yilan County Hall at a depth of 7 km, the bureau’s Seismology Center said.

The strongest temblor, which posted an intensity of 6, was felt in Yilan County’s Nanshan Village, the center said.

The earthquake also measured an intensity of 3 in Zhudong Township in northern Taiwan’s Hsinchu County, and 2 in other regions in northern, eastern and central Taiwan.

Yahoo News
July 28, 2015

Taipei (AFP) – A court has sentenced the head of a Taiwanese company to 20 years in jail for

his role at the centre of a “gutter oil” scandal that gripped the island’s food industry and brought down a minister.

Yeh Wen-hsiang, chairman of Chang Guann Co, was also fined Tw$50 million ($1.6 million) for his part in selling on 243 tonnes of tainted oil collected from cookers, fryers, and grease traps, as well as recycled grease from leather processing plants.

Yeh was first detained in September after the accusations came to light, but was released on bail in October, before being found guilty of safety violations last week. He was sentenced on Friday.

Hundreds of tonnes of cakes, bread, instant noodles, cookies, steamed buns and dumplings had to be removed from shelves in Taiwan and Hong Kong when the case surfaced, authorities said.     [FULL  STORY]

Taipei Times
Date: Jul 29, 2015
By: Staff writer, with CNA

China’s medium and long-range ballistic missiles might be targeting other nations, but they are still a threat to Taiwan, Ministry of National Defense spokesman Major General David Lo (羅紹和) said yesterday.

“Although China’s medium and long-range ballistic missiles are aimed at other countries, they still pose a threat to Taiwan. We hope Taiwanese understand this, even if China’s short-range missiles are the biggest threat to Taiwan,” Lo said after a ministry news briefing.

Lo was responding to an 8,000-word report published on Monday by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Daily detailing the strategic missile forces under China’s Second Artillery Corps.     [FULL  STORY]

Taiwan News
Date: 2015-07-28
By: Matthew Strong, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – The man who stabbed four passengers at Zhongshan Mass Rapid

Transit station on July 20 was charged with attempted homicide and theft Tuesday.

Kuo Yen-chun, 27, attacked people at random with a knife he had stolen from a shop earlier. Rapid action by security staff and a passenger led to his capture on the spot.

If nobody had stopped him, he would have continued killing people until there was nobody left, prosecutors quoted him as saying, asking the court give him a heavy sentence. Even though nobody had died, Kuo had shown no remorse, while the incident caused public unease, prosecutors argued.

The Shilin District Prosecutors Office concluded that using a 20-centimeter-long fruit knife which he had stolen from a supermarket showed clearly that the suspect was intending to kill people, so he should be charged with attempted homicide in four cases.

Kuo reportedly told interrogators that he felt in a bad mood and therefore wanted to go to a crowded place like an MRT station to kill people. The attack took place around 9 p.m. at Zhongshan, a busy station due to the nearby shopping district.     [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2015/07/28
By: Hsu Chih-wei, Yu Kai-hsiang and S.C. Chang

Taipei, July 28 (CNA) Education Minister Wu Se-hwa (吳思華) would like to have a

face-to-face dialogue with the 24 student protesters arrested for intruding into the Ministry of Education buildings last week, officials said Tuesday.

Officials from the ministry’s K-12 Education Administration said priority for the talks will be given to the high school students who participated in the July 23-24 protest and break-in and who now face prosecution for their law-breaking actions.

The K-12 Education Administration plans to hold four dialogue sessions, with five students facing the minister in each session, which will be broadcast live online, the officials said.

The administration will also hold seminars Aug. 30 for students to exchange views with officials on issues related to modifying history curriculum guidelines.     [FULL  STORY]

‘UNACCEPTABLE’:DPP Taipei City Council caucus whip Rosalia Wu said the document failed to address whether taking people into custody was necessary

Taipei Times
Date: Jul 29, 2015
By: Kuo An-chia  /  Staff reporter

The procedure Zhongzheng First Precinct police officers employed when arresting students

who entered the Ministry of Education complex on Thursday last week was legal and the safety of journalists and bystanders on the scene was duly accounted for, the Taipei Police Department said yesterday.

Dozens of people, mostly high-school students, broke into the ministry compound at about 11:35pm on Thursday to protest changes to high-school curriculum guideline changes and, after a brief occupation of the courtyard, 33 individuals — including 24 students and three reporters — were arrested at about 1am on Friday.

“Precinct Chief Chang Chi-wen (張奇文) personally saw to it that a standard operating procedure was disseminated to all precinct officers and repeatedly exhorted his colleagues to maintain the safety of civilians and evict the protestors in a nonviolent manner,” the department said in a report released yesterday reviewing the operation.     [FULL  STORY]

Want China Times
Date: 2015-07-28
By: CNA

Video games play a major role in the daily lives of most Taiwanese, as 66% of respondents to

a Google online survey on local video game habits said they play video games for at least half an hour a day.

The survey, which was conducted by Google and the Gfk market research institute among people between the ages of 16 and 45, also found that among respondents who said they played video games, 52% were female and 48% were male.

In terms of age, the largest group of video game players were people aged between 26 and 35, accounting for 40% of the total.

The 16-25 and 36-45 age brackets each accounted for 30% of total users, indicating that video games have penetrated groups beyond the very young, Google Taiwan said.

If extrapolated over Taiwan’s entire population, the survey’s results suggested that Taiwanese as a whole spend 3,000 years of time every day playing video games.    [FULL  STORY]

Eye On Taiwan Eitor’s Note:  Although this news came out a couple month’s ago, we feel it is important to share with our readers again.

ens-newswore.com
By Shuchen Chang

TAIPEI, Taiwan, May 17, 2015 (ENS) – The Taipei District Court has ruled in favor of former assembly line workers employed between 1970 and 1992 at the now-defunct electronics company Radio Corporation of America, or RCA.

On April 17, the former U.S. company was found to have dumped toxic waste at its Taoyuan f

actory in northern Taiwan, polluting the soil and underground water. Described as the worst industrial disaster in Taiwan’s history, the pollution led to alarmingly high reports of cancer among the RCA workers.
workers

RCA was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. General Electric took over the company in 1985 and split it up the following year.

Statistics show that by the time the RCA workers filed their civil lawsuit in 2004 against RCA and its parent companies – General Electric of the United States and Thomson S.A. (now Technicolor S.A.) of France – more than 1,300 former RCA employees from the Taoyuan factory had cancer.

By then, 221 of them had already died, and the death toll has increased every year since.     [FULL  STORY]

News24
Date: 2015-07-27

Taipei – Sean Chang recalls bright yellow fire ripping through the crowd at the water park, where hundreds of young people had come to seek respite from a hot summer’s day.

“I’m now so easily terrified by seeing yellow lights,” Chang said from a hospital bed in Taipei, where he is receiving treatment for the third-degree burns covering 50% of his body.

The 25-year-old former professional Taekwondo athlete had gone with friends to escape the seasonal heat at the Formosa Water Park in New Taipei, where organisers had also put on a dance party.

“After playing in the water, we approached the concert stage to dance. When something exploded in the air, I turned my head over my shoulder looking back. My eyelashes were immediately burnt,” Chang said from a burn ward at the Tri-Service General Hospital in Taipei.     [FULL  STORY]