■ Travel
Second crash victim dies
A Taiwanese tourist who was critically injured in a bus crash in China on July 13, died yesterday morning en route from Jilin Province to Hong Kong, a Taipei travel industry source said. The man, identified as Fan Kuo-tang (范國棠), died during an airplane flight of the lung injuries he sustained in the crash. Fan's body is temporarily being kept in Hong Kong. One woman died in the crash and the 10 others in the group were injured. Seven of the injured tourists -- accompanied by their family members who had rushed to China with the assistance of Straits Exchange Foundation -- arrived back in Taiwan yesterday and immediately checked in to hospitals for further treatment. Two others remain hospitalized in Beijing, the Taipei Association of Travel Agents reported. The tourist bus was 19km from a Changbaishan resort when its brakes failed and it crashed into a ditch after hitting a bridge. The tour group left Taipei on July 9 for a 10-day tour of China.
■ Politics
Call to drop outdated labels
A pro-independence group yesterday called for nationwide moves to get rid of the words "provincial" and "Taiwan province" from the people's vocabulary once and for all to "more effectively reflect the truth." The Alliance to Campaign for Rectifying the Name of Taiwan, a group that has been behind the "Call Taiwan, Taiwan" movement, wants immediate moves to be taken nationwide to call the country by its real name -- Taiwan -- rather than anything else, such as the Republic of China or Taiwan province. Alliance executive director Wang Hsien-chi (王獻極) said that "Taiwan province" went out of existence when the National Assembly passed a resolution July 18, 1997 to freeze the operations of the Taiwan Provincial Government. Since "Taiwan province" no longer exists, Wang said, it is ridiculous that people continue to use terms like "provincial," "province-wide," and "around the province." Even some "fundamentalists" from within the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) have made the same mistakes, Wang said. Wang said his alliance will initiate a nationwide "fault-finding" campaign shortly in the hope that people will remind each others not to use these outdated terms.
■ Health
Mandatory testing urged
The director of the Taoyuan County Government's Department of Health urged the central government yesterday to make HIV testing a mandatory requirement for pregnant women to prevent the spread of AIDS. Lin Hsueh-jung (林雪蓉) said her department began to conduct HIV tests on pregnant women in March. "More than 9,000 pregnant women have so far undergone HIV tests and two of them tested positive. We immediately administered drugs to both of them. After the first delivered her child, we have twice conducted HIV tests on the baby. Fortunately, the child has tested negative. We'll continue conducting similar tests on the baby in the coming four months," Lin said. Taiwan has 200,000 newborns each year. Lin said if the central government makes HIV testing mandatory for pregnant women, it would be very helpful in taking timely precautionary measures to prevent the birth of HIV-infected babies. The Department of Health said it is working on a plan for implementing mandatory HIV testing for pregnant women. According to official records, there have only been 11 cases of mother-to-child HIV transmissions in this country.
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