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.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater