The government will strengthen customs inspections for diplomatic pouch containers used by foreign envoys in Taiwan, Department of Customs Administration Director General Chien Liang-chi (簡良機) said yesterday.
“One or two cases in which diplomatic pouch containers were used for smuggling were found last year. We will step up control to put an end to smuggling via this channel,” Chien said at the legislature’s Economics Committee.
Chien made the remarks in response to lawmakers’ questions following a report in yesterday’s Chinese-language China Times.
The paper said that Wu Shih-tsai (吳思材), a broker involved in the recent diplomatic fund scandal, was allegedly found smuggling peanuts, mushrooms and tobacco into the country via diplomatic pouch containers early last year.
The report said that Wu, who falsely claimed to be the commercial attache of the Haitian embassy, had bribed former Haitian ambassador Paul Raymond Peridon into sending diplomatic containers in which he concealed smuggled goods.
The Customs Tariff Act (關稅法) states that members of the foreign corps are free from inspections of goods they bring into Taiwan, but those goods can be inspected if the customs authorities think it is necessary, Chien said.
In related news, lawmakers sitting on the legislature’s Education and Culture Committee yesterday decided to unfreeze half of the NT$343.7 million (US$11.2 million) budget earmarked for training the 64 athletes who have qualified for this year’s Beijing Olympics.
The committee had frozen the budget contingent on the Sports Affairs Council’s briefing to lawmakers about its plan to help the athletes win gold medals in August.
Earlier this year, the council predicated Taiwanese athletes could win seven gold medals, with the best chances in the taekwondo, weightlifting, archery and tennis competitions.
The council, however, said recently that only Chu Mu-yen (朱木炎), who won a gold medal in the taekwondo competition at the Athens Olympics in 2004, has at least a 70 percent chance of winning a gold medal this year.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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