■ Election
Election-bet suspects caught
More people were apprehended over the past two days in the government's campaign to eliminate gambling on the outcome of the March 20 election, the Criminal Investigation Bureau reported yesterday. Under the "Leiting 30" (雷霆三十) campaign launched Wednesday to crack down on underground gambling groups, particularly those applying the Hong Kong horseracing-lottery mechanism to offer bets, police have arrested 149 people suspected of being involved in 135 cases of illegal gambling on the election. Authorities say they have been aware for the last month that wagers on the outcome of the presidential election have been rampant nationwide, particularly in the center and south of the country. Betting, like other forms of gambling, is illegal. The campaign was launched to stop gambling rings from manipulating the election by offering big stakes, officials said.
■ Society
Buddhist elder honored
President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) decorated a Buddhist elder, Ying Shun (印順), in Taiping, Taichung County, yesterday. In a brief ceremony, the president decorated the 99-year-old elder with the Order of Propitious Clouds with Grand Cordon to honor his contribution to society. Born in Haining County, Zhejian (浙江) province, in 1906, Elder Ying Shun converted to Buddhism in 1930 and devoted himself to the studies of Buddhist theory. He moved to Taiwan in 1953 to promote Buddhism, urge his followers to live out Buddhism in their daily lives, and has been lauded as the most knowledgeable Chinese Buddhist master after Hsuan Chang (玄奘), a Buddhist master who lived from AD 602 to AD 664. Ying Shun was known for harboring a young runaway woman in his temple in Hualien in 1963. The woman, Cheng Yen (証嚴), became an apostle and later founded the well-known Tzu Chi (慈濟) Buddhist Compassionate Relief Foundation.
■ Politics
Article 17 amendment read
The pan-blue camp's proposed amendment to Article 17 of the Referendum Law (公民投票法) had its first reading in the legislature yesterday and will be reviewed by the Home and Nations Committee next. The amendment would require an emergency order from the president and approval from the legislature before a defensive referendum could be called. The pan-green camp has vowed to block the amendment. Interparty negotiations in the committee could take up to four months, so the proposed amendment will not affect the referendum on March.20.
■ Education
Tsinghua links up with UW
National Tsinghua University in Hsinchu will sign a cooperative pack in the middle of this month with the Seattle-based University of Washington to boost two-way academic exchanges, according to a school spokesman. The two sides are slated to ink the accord on March 18 at Tsinghua campus, when Yash Gupta, the dean of UW's Business School, will arrive in Taiwan, the spokesman said. Under the terms of the five-year accord, Tsinghua's Technology Management College will invite professors from Washington to teach courses on the world's newest business management know-how, especially designed for government officials and personnel from the Hsinchu Science-based Industrial Park, he said. The two schools will also exchange professors and students to build relations and further strengthen their academic research efforts.
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