The public should pay attention to the certification labels on pest control products before using them, to ensure that people stay safe while combating pests and insects this summer, the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said.
The administration said it had requested all pesticide manufacturing companies to submit documents that prove their products’ ingredients and effects. This was done to ensure the safety and quality of the many different kinds of household pest control products found in the market.
So far, 672 types of products have been registered and certified by the administration as environmentally friendly and safe pest control agents.
The public should avoid purchasing pest control products from unknown sources, such as some products sold on the Internet of which the effects have been exaggerated, said Yuan Shaw-ying (袁紹英), director-general of the EPA’s Department of Environmental Sanitation and Toxic Substances.
Yuan added that the administration’s latest inspection of the ingredients of 124 pest control agents resulted in three products not receiving EPA qualification, resulting in a 97.58 percent qualification rate.
The three products failed because their effective ingredients all surpassed the allowed levels of error tolerance, he added.
Yuan said that in last year’s inspection of pesticide products, 426 items out of almost 30,000 tested items did not qualify, accounting for a qualification rate of about 98.5 percent.
“The safest and most effective way to get rid of household pests and insects is to clean up the household environment. Only use pesticides occasionally, when absolutely necessary. People should pay attention to the product labels and choose qualified products registered at the EPA,” Yuan said.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS