CRIME
NT$43m in cigarettes seized
The Coast Guard Administration has seized two shipments of smuggled cigarettes in Taichung and New Taipei City with a total market value of NT$43 million (US$1.41 million), coast guard officials said yesterday. Alerted by a tip-off, coast guard officials in Tainan found that a Taiwan-registered cargo ship that usually travels between Kaohsiung and Japan departed from Keelung Port on Saturday, but applied to enter Taichung Port on Sunday under the pretext of maintenance and resupply, said Ou Ling-jia (歐凌嘉), head of the coast guard’s central branch. A team of coast guard officers from several counties early yesterday found four containers holding about 79,900 cartons of untaxed cigarettes with an estimated market value of NT$35 million. Meanwhile, the northern branch of the coast guard on Sunday seized 9,447 cartons of smuggled cigarettes worth NT$8 million at Yanliao Beach (鹽寮海灘) in New Taipei City, which were believed to have been unloaded from two fishing boats, officials said.
MILITARY
Tsai promotes 22 officers
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has approved promotions for 22 senior military personnel, the Ministry of National Defense announced yesterday. Tsai promoted four officers to the rank of two-star general or lieutenant-general, while the other 18 were elevated to the rank of one-star general or major-general and vice admiral, the ministry said in a statement. Tsai is to attend a conferral ceremony for the officers in Taipei on Thursday. The promotions are to officially take effect next month, the ministry said.
TRAVEL
Travel envoys wanted: Japan
Japan’s Higashihiroshima City is seeking travel ambassadors from Taiwan to visit for four days as part of a tourism promotion effort, the city government said in a press release on Sunday. Applications will be open online until 3pm on July 23. Four people will be selected and offered free return tickets and accommodation in Higashihiroshima, a city best known for its sake. The selected ambassadors are to travel in pairs from Nov. 9 to Nov. 12 and are to be joined by a reporter, according to a Japanese travel Web site, which has teamed up with the city government to launch the tourism program. The names of the successful applicants will be posted on the travel Web site at 3pm on Aug. 20. Detailed information is available online at chugoku.letsgojp.com/archives/323886.
NATIONAL DEFENSE
Security a priority: Huang
Information security is a part of national security and a key priority for the government, Presidential Office spokesman Alex Huang (黃重諺) said yesterday. His comments came in the wake of a Financial Times report that said Beijing has been ramping up coercive measures against the government since President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) election in 2016. Huang said that the National Security Council and the Department of Cyber Security plan to create a mechanism that ensures information security at the national level, establish an information security team to safeguard the nation’s cybersafety and promote the development of information security technology for both national defense and commercial purposes. Many other democratic nations have experienced similar increases in China’s aggressiveness, which has included cyberattacks aimed at stealing sensitive government data and technology secrets, he said.
IMMIGRATION
Vietnam spouses main group
Vietnam last year remained the main source of foreign spouses in Taiwan, with 3,907 Vietnamese becoming naturalized citizens, the Ministry of the Interior said. It said that Vietnamese accounted for 72.8 percent of all residents who gained citizenship last year, with most of them being spouses of Taiwanese. Of the 5,366 citizens naturalized last year, 3,907 were from Vietnam, 533 from Indonesia, 471 from the Philippines, 122 from Thailand, 56 from Malaysia, 40 from Myanmar, 12 from Cambodia and six from Singapore, ministry data showed. The total number represented a 65 percent increase from 2016, but a 59.4 percent decline from 2008, the ministry said. Of the people who gained citizenship last year, 91.7 percent were women, 86.9 percent were spouses and 95.9 percent were from Southeast Asian countries. In 2015, the number of people who were naturalized was 3,252, a record low in a declining annual trend since 2008, when the number was 13,230, the data showed.
RAILWAYS
Alishan line to change hands
The management of the Alishan Forest Railway in Chiayi is to be moved to the Forestry Bureau of the Council of Agriculture from Sunday, the bureau said. The railway is to be operated by the bureau’s newly established Alishan Forest Railway and Cultural Heritage Office instead of the Taiwan Railways Administration, which has been running the service since May 1, 2013. The new office plans to raise starting salaries and establish a performance bonus system to encourage its employees, the bureau said. Meanwhile, it remains unclear whether services will resume on one of the railway’s main lines — the Chiayi City to Shizihlu (十字路) stretch — before the new operator takes over.
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