■ Cross-strait ties
Notorious gangster arrested
One of the country's most wanted criminals has been arrested in Guangdong Province the National Police Administration (NPA) confirmed yesterday. Police said that Wu Tung-tang (吳桐潭) was arrested in the city of Zhuhai earlier this month and that they then faxed information on Wu, including his fingerprints, to Guangdong police to verify his identity. The NPA said it will arrange for Wu to be repatriated via Kinmen. Wu and some collegues reportedly arrived in China from Thailand on March 14.
■ Diplomacy
`Go South' policy working
The government will conti-nue to promote its "go south" policy to encourage invest-ment in Southeast Asia and boost cooperative ties with countries in the region, Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Tou Chou-seng (杜筑生) said yesterday. Delivering a report on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs work agenda at a legislative committee meeting, Tou said Southeast Asia is one of the four target areas for intensified diplo-matic work, along with the US, Japan and the EU. Since the government adopted a "go south" policy to encour-age businesspeople to invest in Southeast Asia, Tou said, relations with Southeast Asian countries have been strengthened significantly. "The level of bilateral consultations with Singa-pore, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia have been upgraded, and the status of our representative offices in Thailand and Indonesia have also been enhanced," Tou said.
■ Cross-strait ties
Wang not going to Singapore
Taiwan Affairs spokesman Zhang Mingqing (張銘清) said yesterday that Wang Daohan (汪道涵) has no plans to visit Singapore next month. Zhang made the remark in a regular press conference yesterday in Beijing which is seen to have shut the door for a possible Koo-Wang meeting in April. On Tues-day, Straits Exchange Foun-dation Chairman Koo Chen-fu (辜振甫) expressed his willingness to meet Wang in a cross-strait relations symposium scheduled for next month in Singapore. Wang is the head of China's Association of Relations across the Taiwan Strait. April 26 will be the 10th anniversary of the first Koo-Wang meeting in Singapore in 1992.
■ Diplomacy
Visa-free tourism urged
Wu Wen-Ya (吳文雅), repre-sentative of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Malaysia said yesterday that if Kuala Lumpur were to match the visa-free treatment that Taiwan gives to Malaysians, Taiwanese would "travel in droves" to the Southeast Asian country. Wu noted that Malaysian tourist visits to Taiwan increased by 50 percent after Taipei granted 14-day visa-free entry to Malaysians. Wu said he believes that when the visa-free period is expanded to 30 days in May, the number of Malaysian tourists will increase dramatically. The number of Taiwan tourists to Malaysia totaled 209,700 last year, down from 250,000 visitors of the year before.
■ Society
People fear overwork
Many people worry about dying from overwork, according to the results of a survey released yesterday. The survey of 11,621 white-collar workers, conducted by the 104 Job Bank, found that 37.6 percent of ordinary workers said they are worried about dying from overwork. The ratio reached 48.9 percent among senior management executives and 66.7 percent among corpor-ate owners.
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,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods