■APEC
Women leaders attend meet
A Taiwanese delegation has arrived in Thailand to attend the APEC forum's 8th Women Leaders' Network Meeting scheduled to open in the northern city of Chiang Mai today. The 12-member delegation is headed by Lin Fang-mei (林芳玫), chairwoman of the National Youth Commission. About 350 delegates representing government, business, academic and non-profit sectors from 20 APEC economic entities are taking part in the meeting dubbed: Women Make a World of Difference: Partnerships for Gender and Development. Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Chinnawat is scheduled to address the opening ceremony, which will be followed by split-panel discussions focusing on three sub-themes, featuring knowledge and empowerment, security for women and women entrepreneurship.
■ SARS
Singapore donates gear
Singapore has donated two thermal imaging scanners to help identify SARS sufferers and two ventilators to Taiwan, a government agency said yesterday. Ho Ching (何晶), executive director of Temasek Holdings, the investment arm of the Singapore government, presented the machines to Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Ling-San (林陵三) in Taipei, it said in statement. "This latest contribution to Taiwan by the Temasek Group of Companies follows earlier contributions to China -- Beijing and Shanghai -- and Indonesia," Temasek said. "This forms of part of the Temasek Holdings Group's ongoing efforts to forge closer relationships with other Asian economies, and represents the commitment of the Temasek Group of Companies towards enhancing the economic prosperity of the region."
■ Barcelona games
Police win five golds
Taiwanese police officers demonstrated their shooting prowess Tuesday at the 2003 World Police and Fire Games in Barcelona, Spain, National Police Administration (NPA) officials said yesterday.
Chinese Taipei grabbed five more gold medals, all in shooting competitions, on the third day of the biennial games for the world's law enforcement and fire-fighting professionals being held July 27 to Aug 3.
In the men's group rifle competition, police officers Su Chung-suo (蘇崇碩), Lee Tung-hui (李同輝), Tsai Ming-wang (蔡明王) and Liu Chin-yuan (劉晉遠) each won a gold medal by finishing with a combined score of 2,193 points, beating their Spanish counterparts by a narrow 4 points and leaving the defending champion Malaysian team a distant 28 points behind. Meanwhile, officer Lee Tung-hui bagged another gold medal in the men's individual rifle shooting competition, with a total score of 584 points.
■ APEC
APEC holds Incubator Forum
APEC opened its first Incubator Forum in Taipei yesterday, which will be attended by representatives from 21 APEC member economies through Aug. 1. The forum, the first large-scale international conference to be held in Taiwan since the outbreak of SARS in mid-March, serves as a platform for exchanges among APEC members and has elicited a positive response from the participants, who will discuss issues related to strategy, policy and international cooperation centered on the theme of "Business Incubation in the New Century." Taiwan is slated to hold the second APEC Incubator Forum next year.
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
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
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: