■ Politics
2004 election date set
Next year's presidential election will be held March 20, a Saturday, the Central Election Commission announced yesterday. The commission said it has crafted a detailed schedule and standard operating procedures to ensure the orderly proceedings of election affairs. It said it will accept candidacy registra-tion between Jan. 31 and Feb. 6. A list of qualified candidates will be published before Feb. 11 and the candidates will draw lots Feb. 13 to decide the order
in which their names will appear on the election bulletin and ballots. The official election bulletin will be issued Feb. 20 when the formal campaign period begins. Commission-sponsored televised forums for candidates to present their campaign platforms will be held between Feb. 21 and March 19.
■ Weather
CWB watching storm
Central Weather Bureau meteorologists said yester-day that they were not sure yet whether tropical storm Kujira will affect Taiwan, but that they are closely moni-toring the system's progress. Kujira, which formed near Guam last week, had been reported as a strong typhoon before reducing in strength on its way toward the Philippines and being downgraded to a tropical storm. Kujira was located some 1,300km away from the Philippines, moving east-ward at a speed of 15kph as of 8 am yesterday.
■ Tourism
2003 travel fairs opens
The 2003 Taiwan Interna-tional Travel Fair opened yesterday in Taichung, the third annual event of its kind. The fair will run through Sunday at the Taichung World Trade Center. The main feature of the opening was a show by
a group from Thailand, which performed several dances. The Taipei-based Central America Trade Office, set up by the embassies of Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guate-mala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama, also put on a special "ecological journey" to give visitors to the fair a chance to experience the ancient Mayan culture, the Central American rain forest as well as handicrafts and aromatic coffees.
■ Diplomacy
Chen meets Costa Ricans
President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) said yesterday that he hopes to lead a delegation to visit Costa Rica next month or in June. Chen made the remarks as he received a legislative dele-gation from Costa Rica. He noted that Costa Rican President Abel Pacheco visited Taipei last October, and that exchanges between the two countries have been close. He expressed appreciation to the Costa Rican legislature for passing a resolution last October urging China to remove missiles deployed against Taiwan.
■ Politics
Lu meets with lawmakers
Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) yesterday advocated a division of labor between Taiwan and China, saying businesspeople should keep their product research and development in Taiwan, their manufacturing operations in China, and their product sales global. Lu and other members of Scientific Advisory Committee to the president met with law-makers from the legislature's Sci-tech and Information Committees and the
National Defense Commit-tee at the Presidential Office. Lu said she would like to consult with lawmakers on updating many of the now outdated science-related regulations.
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,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching