World News for Students of English

27-03-2023 07:00

On Monday, Vietnamese authorities seized seven tons of ivory smuggled from Angola. According to the government, it was the largest seizure of wildlife products in years.

Customs authorities in Haiphong City found the ivory hidden in a container declared to customs as peanuts, and according to officials, the cargo had transited via Singapore. Trade in ivory is illegal in Vietnam; however, wildlife trafficking remains widespread. Other items often found smuggled into the country include pangolin scales, rhino horns, and tiger carcasses.

This followed the finding of more than 600 kilograms of African ivory last month at the city’s Lach Huyen port. Last month, a court in Vietnam sentenced a man to 13 years in prison for trafficking nearly 10 tons of endangered animal parts from Africa, including ivory and rhino horns.

Difficult words: seizure (the action of capturing someone or something using force), pangolin (an African and Asian mammal that has a body covered with horny overlapping scales), carcass (the dead body of an animal).

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