Although cigarette sales were reduced by 13 percent last year, some indoor establishments, particularly Internet cafes, still need to improve their anti-smoking efforts, an anti-smoking group said yesterday.
Yau Sea-wain (姚思遠), president of the John Tung Foundation, said that while the problem of secondhand smoke had been curtailed since a smoking ban targeting indoor public spaces and workplaces took effect in January 2008, the foundation still reported 1,043 violations of the ban over the past year.
Of those violations, cases involving Internet cafes topped all other indoor establishments or workplaces, Yau said.
You Po-tsun (游伯村), a Bureau of Health Promotion official in charge of public health education, said a survey based on 650,000 visits by local health bureaus to indoor public areas over the past year had confirmed a decline in both smoking and secondhand smoke.
The survey found secondhand smoke in public transportation facilities and indoor establishments, including roofed transportation stations, KTVs, Internet cafes and comic-book stores, had dropped 50 percent, while household secondhand smoke fell by more than 20 percent.
Citing a Bureau of Health Promotion estimate, You said 1.18 billion packs of cigarettes were sold in Taiwan last year, down 13 percent from 1.36 billion in 2008.
Major violations of the public smoking ban over the past year included a Kaohsiung company selling cigarette packs containing promotional picture cards, which drew a fine of NT$5.2 million, and a person in Tainan selling cigarettes online, which drew a fine of NT$8 million.
A Taipei night club was fined NT$5 million for promoting cigarettes on its premises, the Bureau of Health Promotion said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift