Taipei prosecutors are probing two livestock feed processors that purchased industrial-grade copper sulfate to see if they illegally sold the chemical to downstream processors or farmers, prosecutors said yesterday.
The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office also said the owner of Weihe, the company that sold the industrial-grade copper sulfate to the feed processors, surnamed Fan (范), was given a deferred prosecution on Tuesday for violations of the Feed Control Act (飼料管理法).
Fan purchased 6,025kg of the chemical from Amia Co in Taoyuan County in February last year and sold it to other feed processors, knowing that his company did not have a permit to sell feed products, the office said.
It said prosecutors would review related files from the Council of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Administration and probe the two feed companies to determine if they have also violated the act. Hsu Kuei-sen (許桂森), director of the Animal Husbandry Department, said on Wednesday that Weihe had illegally sold the industrial chemical to four feed processors.
Meanwhile, Taoyuan prosecutors launched investigations on Monday into the circulation of the chemical to see if it had been sold to chicken and hog farmers.
Feed-grade copper sulfate is usually mixed into livestock feed as a dietary supplement. However, industrial-grade copper sulfate, used in the manufacturing of printing ink and batteries, contains heavy metals, such as lead and chromium, and is harmful to animals and humans.
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