SOCIETY
IVF births skyrocketing
More than 4,000 test tube babies are born in this country every year, nearly four times the number recorded 10 years ago, the Taiwan Society for Reproductive Medicine said yesterday. The number of infants conceived through in-vitro fertilization (IVF) accounted for 2.47 percent of the total births in 2010, an increase from 0.64 percent in 2001, although the nation’s total fertility rate decreased from 1.4 births per woman aged between 15 and 49 to 0.9 during the same period, the group said. More older women are becoming eager to have children, said Huang Hong-yuan (黃泓淵), the society’s president, adding that the average age of women receiving fertility treatment has gone up from 32 to 35. Statistics from the Bureau of Health Promotion show the chances of a woman older than 41 becoming pregnant are less than 10 percent. By the time a woman reaches the age of 44, the chances of success drop to about 2 percent.
CROSS-STRAIT TIES
TransAsia heads to Hunan
TransAsia Airways is to launch a new route on June 2 between Taipei and Zhangjiajie in China’s Hunan Province, the airline said yesterday. Three flights per week will be flown using 150-seat Airbus A320 planes or 182-seat A321 planes, it said. The airline will be the only Taiwanese carrier offering direct flight services to Zhangjiajie, a city close to the Wulingyuan Scenic Area, a UNESCO world heritage site and a popular tourist attraction. Zhangjiajie hosted 35 million visitors last year, up 15 percent from the previous year, according to the city government. Of the 2.2 million overseas visitors, 150,000 were from Taiwan, making the nation the second-largest source of tourists for Zhangjiajie after South Korea.
Crime
CIB seizes ketamine
Police on Wednesday seized 450kg of ketamine that had been smuggled into Taichung port in a shipping container and apprehended three suspects, the Criminal Investigation Bureau said yesterday. The bureau said it received a tip-off last year, suggesting the main suspect, surnamed Yen (嚴), had been attempting to smuggle drugs from China into the country in shipping containers. After a six-month investigation, police and sniffer dogs found 18 bags of ketamine in a cargo container hidden among more than 600 bags of polyformaldehyde, a chemical compound used to make plastic, the bureau said. Yen and two other suspects were arrested, it said. The ketamine had a market value of NT$300 million (US$10 million) and was enough to supply 1 million drug users, police said.
ENTERTAINMENT
Director Nakata to visit
Japanese movie director Hideo Nakata, best known for his 1998 horror film Ring, is to visit Taipei on May 18 to promote his latest movie, local film publisher CaiChang International said yesterday. Nakata and the lead actors from The Complex — Atsuko Maeda and Hiroki Narimiya — are scheduled to arrive in Taipei on the same day that the film is released in Japan, CaiChang said. They are to hold a press conference before meeting local fans in a ticketed event in Taipei, the publisher said. The Complex is Nakata’s first film in six years. His most notable works are the first two films of the Ring franchise, which has been remade by Hollywood into two films — The Ring (2002) and The Ring Two (2005), which Nakata also directed. The Complex is to open in Taiwan on May 31.
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