SOCIETY
Match-making days proposed
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lin Hung-chih (林鴻池) has proposed “match-making” holidays for government employees in a bid to boost the nation’s falling marriage and birth rates, his office said yesterday. Lin called for “creative measures” to marry off the high number of single civil servants, such as granting them up to two days off a year to join match-making activities, he said in a statement. A record low of 117,099 Taiwanese couples tied the knot last year, down 24.4 percent from the previous year, according to the Ministry of the Interior. The nation’s birth rate is also among the world’s lowest. Only 191,310 babies were born last year, with the average birth rate falling to 1.03 for each woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 births.
CRIME
Placenta smugglers arrested
The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said on Thursday that it had arrested two people suspected of smuggling 1,700 doses of sheep placenta into Taiwan. The total market value of the haul was around NT$8 million (US$242,000), according to CGA official Chao Chi-tien (趙吉田). One of the suspects, surnamed Chiu (邱), was arrested while attempting to deliver 700 doses to a man surnamed Yeh (葉). Both men were arrested at the scene, Chao said. Another 1,000 doses were seized at the cargo terminal at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport after the arrest, Chao added. “The profits are handsome,” Chao said, adding that sheep placenta is believed to have anti-aging effects and can be sold in beauty clinics for up to NT$6,000 per dose, while the cost of buying it in South Korea and smuggling it into Taiwan is less than NT$200 per dose.
EDUCATION
Cursive writing to be taught
Minister of Education Wu Ching-ji (吳清基) yesterday pledged to enhance the teaching of English cursive writing to local students in response to a legislator’s complaint about the lack of cursive writing teaching in schools. During a question-and-answer session with Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Justin Chou (周守訓), Wu promised that he would urge the ministry’s task force responsible for amending curriculum guidelines to review the nation’s policy on teaching English writing. Chou voiced the concerns after he found that some top local high school students could not read English cursive handwriting. The nation’s junior high school curriculum guidelines do not require that students know how to write in cursive.
EDUCATION
Japanese school donates
An elementary School in Pingtung County recently received a donation of NT$110,000 from a Japanese school as a restoration fund. Representatives of Kobe Takatsuka Senior High School in Japan visited Linbian Elementary School on Thursday to make the donation during a graduation trip to Taiwan. One of the teachers said the school’s second-grade teachers and students raised the money through school and neighborhood events after learning that some areas of Taiwan were damaged badly by Typhoon Morakot in August last year. The school contacted the Pingtung County Government, which suggested the donation should go to Linbian Elementary School, which was flooded to a depth of 2m during the typhoon. School principal Liu Wan-te (劉萬得) said the donation will be used to help the students, many of whose parents became unemployed after the typhoon and approximately 200 students who cannot afford their lunch and tuition fees.
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