■ Crime
Two busted with illicit beef
Two people were caught last Wednesday at the CKS International Airport trying to bring in beef from Japan, despite a ban on its import, the Taipei Customs Offices said yesterday. Japan is the only Asian victim of mad cow disease and has reported 20 cases since September 2001. The government has banned the import of Japanese beef since 2001. Inspectors seized nearly 20kg of frozen beef from the luggage of the two passengers, including a Taiwanese and a Japanese, when they arrived from Tokyo aboard a China Airlines flight. The smuggled beef was shipped to a quarantine center in Hsinchu where it will be destroyed.
■ Crime
Police foil heroin deal
Police, in concert with US and Thai authorities, foiled a drug deal on Monday night involving 7kg of heroin with a street value of more than NT$100 million (US$3.13 million). The deal was masterminded by a ring based in central Taiwan that had previously smuggled drugs from Thailand, police said. Local police had monitored several members of the ring after Thai police arrested a group of Taiwanese for smuggling heroin at the Thai-Myanmar border in April. Police found out that one of the ring members was planning to make a deal in Taipei this month and made the seizure on Monday evening after an ambush. Police said they are expanding their investigation into the ring. This was the first score made by the international anti-drug team since Taiwanese police posted liaison officers in Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam in May, police officials said.
■ Weather
Storm heading this way
Tropical Storm Haitang (海棠), the fifth this year, formed yesterday morning. Forecasters said yesterday that Haitang was about 3,000km east of Taiwan. Although Haitang is moving westward, whether it will affect the weather in Taiwan remains uncertain. The bureau will closely observe Haitang's movements and its path will be predicted more accurately by the weekend. Meanwhile, a record high temperature for this year, 36.4?C, was measured at noon yesterday in Taipei City. Forecasters at the Central Weather Bureau (CWB) said that similar high temperatures will be measured in the following days and residents should be smart enough to take prevention measures against heatstroke.
■ Health
Taiwan donates vaccine
Taiwan has donated 100 doses of the flu vaccine tamiflu to Vietnam to help the country fight avian flu outbreaks, a Department of Health (DOH) official said yesterday. According to the official, the vaccine was presented to Vietnamese health authorities by Kuo Shu-sung (郭旭崧), director of the DOH's Center for Disease Control (CDC), in a ceremony held in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi earlier in the day.
■ Asian politics
Chen gets teleconference
President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) will on July 26 hold a teleconference with the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan (FCCJ), according to statement by the FCCJ yesterday. Chen will be the first head of state from Taiwan to be invited by the FCCJ to speak to its members. The conference with the FCCJ has tentatively been scheduled to last for two hours, during which Chen will give a speech, take questions on relations with Japan, China and the rest of the world and update the outlook for Taiwan.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods