■ Defense
US hotline rumored
The Ministry of National Defense declined to comment on media reports that Taiwan and the US have set up a telephone hot line to cope with possible military crises in the Taiwan Strait. Ministry spokesman Major General Huang Suey-sheng (黃穗生) said Taiwan-US exchanges have consistently proceeded smoothly under the framework of the Taiwan Relations Act. Nevertheless, Huang said, it is the ministry's policy to refrain from publicly discussing Taiwan-US military exchanges or cooperative programs. Local newspapers quoted a research fellow with the noted US military think tank RAND Corporation as saying that in the face of China's mounting military threat to Taiwan, Taipei and Washington installed a military hot line in the second half of last year to facilitate communications in the event of a military crisis in the Strait.
■ Environment
Spoonbill spotting debunked
After checking a report that more than 10 black-faced spoonbills had arrived in Taiwan, the Tainan County government said yesterday that it was merely a rumor. The endangered black-faced spoonbills usually start arriving in Taiwan to spend the winter in early October, but reports have said that 10 of the rare birds have been spotted in central and northern Taiwan and that the birds have yet to fly to their major habitat in Chiku in Tainan County. The reports said that information collected over the past years has shown that black-faced spoonbills had appeared in Ilan and Tamsui. It is possible that the birds are stopping over in central and northern Taiwan before flying to Tainan this year, the reports said.
■ Cross-strait ties
Chinese ships detained
The Coast Guard Administration intercepted 13 Chinese fishing ships that entered Kinmen waters in a crackdown yesterday to protect the rights of Kinmen fishermen. The coast guard has been cautious in the wake of Sunday's incident when a coast guard officer was abducted by Chinese fishermen while inspecting a vessel in waters near Matsu. At 8am yesterday, a coast guard cutter and frigate and two Kinmen fishing boats formed a protection fleet in waters south of Kinmen. They found the 13 Chinese ships in waters southwest of Kinmen, and escorted the ships and the 26 crew -- 18 men and eight women -- back to the Hsinhu fishing harbor for questioning. Twelve of the boats were from Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, while the other is from Nanao, Guangdong Province.
■ Military
Suicide linked to CAL crash
An army sergeant committed suicide after claiming to have fallen under the spell of a stewardess killed in a plane crash, the army and an Internet news service said yesterday. The sergeant, surnamed Peng, was one of the 300 servicemen involved in transporting the bodies of 225 people killed when a China Airlines plane crashed into the Taiwan Strait in May last year, an army spokesman said. "Since then, Peng seemed to have developed a psychological trauma ... He was frequently in a state of oblivion," the spokesman said. Peng told his colleagues that he had dreamed several times about a stewardess who died in the crash, who asked him to marry her. The spokesman said Peng, who had received psychotherapy since the crash, was found dead in his barracks on Penghu last Friday.
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