■ Visit
Nadia Comaneci jets in
Celebrated Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci arrived in Taiwan yesterday for a five-day visit to give lectures and training to local athletes. Comaneci, an unforgettable figure in the history of the Olympic Games, scored the first "perfect 10" on the parallel bars in 1976 at Montreal, which was also the first full-point performance on record at the world's most prominent sporting event. While in Taipei, Comaneci will visit the National Palace Museum and exchange experience with coaches and athletes from northern Taiwan at National Taiwan Normal University. She will then travel to Tsoying national training center in southern Kaohsiung and is expected to stage an exhibition for the Chinese Taipei team that will take part in the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens.
■ Australia
Drowning hearing begins
Five Japanese men appeared in court yesterday on manslaughter charges after the drowning of a Taiwanese man in Brisbane, court officials said. Jun Hamajima, 22, Akiro Ookawarra, 23, Hiroki Suzuki, 20, Takaaki Aizawa, 21, and Tai Chi Maruta, 19, appeared in Brisbane Magistrates Court charged with the manslaughter of Hsu Wei-Li (徐維力). The men were not required to enter a plea. The 18-year-old Taiwanese man's body was found Friday in the Brisbane River. Police prosecutors said Hsu, a student at an international college in Brisbane, had been at a barbecue with friends near the river on Thursday night when he went missing. They allege the five Japanese men -- who also attended the college -- threw him into the water. Magistrate James Gordon granted bail to the five men to reappear in court on Feb. 3 next year.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift