■TRADE
Firm on watch list over Iran
The government has placed a local company on a watch list after the firm sold specialized equipment to Iran, an official said yesterday. “The company is on an observation list, which means it must obtain prior export permits, after it imported 108 pressure sensors from Europe and sold them to Iran in March 2008,” the Bureau of Foreign Trade official said. Pressure sensors can measure altitudes and are used in aircraft and rockets. The official, who declined to identify the company, said the device was neither high-tech nor restricted, rejecting media reports that it could be used to make nuclear weapons. Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper reported last month that Iran tried to buy the device for more than a year from European and US firms before turning to a Taiwanese firm. UN officials are investigating whether the European companies conducted proper checks of end-user certificates for the equipment, the paper said.
■JUSTICE
Manga for prosecutors
The nation’s prosecutors have been asked to read a Japanese manga dealing with compassion and tolerance in an effort to improve their performance, an official said yesterday. The Ministry of Justice has given prosecutors 2,000 copies of Love, based on the true story of how a bereaved mother reconciled with a family whose young son killed her boy. The story was made into a TV series in Japan that was aired in Taiwan last year. The reading assignment is part of the ministry’s efforts to promote “restorative justice” — which seeks to encourage repair and reconciliation between victims and offenders, said an official at the Department of Rehabilitation and Social Protection, adding that: “We hope prosecutors will become more compassionate so they can help promote understanding and ease confrontation between the two sides.”
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