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The Olympics have featured heavily in the news this past week here in Taiwan. So far female athletes have picked up all of the medals for Chinese Taipei, which is the name used by the Taiwan team.
Last Sunday, Hsu Shu-ching won Taiwan’s first gold of the Games after Chinese weightlifter Li Yajun was disqualified for failing to complete the clean and jerk portion of the event.
Fellow weightlifter Kuo Hsin-chun won bronze in the women’s weightlifting 58 kg group on Monday. That takes Taiwan’s medal haul for the Games to three.
Taiwan’s women’s archery team has also won a bronze medal.
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Also this past week, the Presidential Office announced that a new law dealing with ill-gotten political party assets has taken effect. The announcement effectively freezes all political party assets.
On July 25, the legislature passed the Act Governing the Handling of Ill-gotten Properties by Political Parties and Their Affiliate Organizations. The act states that all properties obtained by political parties after 1945 are to be considered illegal and must be returned to the state. This does not include party membership fees and political donations.
A Cabinet-level committee will also be set up to deal with the opposition Kuomintang’s (KMT) assets. That party is the primary target of the law. The governing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) considers this a major milestone in democracy and transitional justice.
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And finally, this past week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said Friday that a second Taiwanese national has been confirmed to have the Zika virus after returning from the Caribbean.
The patient is a 27-year-old man from New Taipei who had been working in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. The CDC said the man had arrived back in Taiwan on Thursday and presented himself to health authorities with a fever and a rash. Testing confirmed the man was infected with Zika and he has been placed under quarantine.
On August 4th, a case of Zika was detected in a 43-year-old Taiwanese woman who had spent several months in St. Lucia.
The latest case is the fifth imported case of Zika infection and the second in a Taiwanese national. The virus is rarely fatal but has been linked to birth defects in babies born to mothers who contract the virus while pregnant.