The Council of Agriculture (COA) promised yesterday to purchase rice at guaranteed prices from Tainan County farmers whose paddies were found to be contaminated with heavy metals and are therefore having difficulty selling their crops.

The Tainan County Government ordered the metal processing plant in Houbi Township to suspend its operations yesterday due to its causing the contamination rice paddies with cadmium.

A police officer was arrested last week for skipping out on the freeway electronic tolls up to 547 times.

A college student who killed his ex-girlfriend by ramming her with his car, then running over her twice was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Tainan District Court yesterday.

Crops contaminated by heavy metal in the "Last Rice Farmer's" hometown in Tainan County will be destroyed later this week, an Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) official said Monday.

Eight Tainan couples yesterday tied the knot in a traditional wedding ceremony at the famous Ching Liao Old Street in Tainan County.

The endangered black-faced spoonbills have migrated in record numbers to southern Taiwan to spend the winter this year.

Two Taiwanese scholars have been elected as members of the non-government International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), according to a statement released Wednesday by National Cheng Kung University (NCKU).

The Criminal Investigation Bureau yesterday arrested a Tainan university student who allegedly hacked onto people's online photo albums, the Central News Agency reported.

When Lin Chung-chih and his wife decided 14 years ago to go into organic farming, neither of them had any experience in the field. He was a new Industrial Design graduate and she was an art and design worker.