■ Environment
Nation scrubs public sites
More than 46,000 volunteers from 220 groups marked the 2004 Clean Up the World day yesterday by cleaning up public sites around the island, according to the organizers. Lai Tung-ming (賴東明), chairman of the Good Neighborhood Foundation, said volunteers were helping to clean up 665 beaches, parks and other public places from Paishawan to Kenting, and also on the three island counties of Lienchiang, Kinmen and Penghu. He said that at this fourth and biggest Clean Up the World observance, participants were expected to collect 15,000 bags of rubbish. In Taipei, Deputy Mayor Yeh Chin-chuan (葉金川) and Environmental Protection Administration Administrator Chang Juu-en (張祖恩) led a group of volunteers to clean up the community in which the first case of severe acute respiratory syndrome was reported in 2003. Lai said the campaign is part of a global cleanup movement involving 40 million volunteers in 125 countries.
■ Education
Life education group starts
A group of local educators founded the Taiwan Life Education Society yesterday in an effort to train the first teachers in life education, which will become part of the senior high school curriculum in 2006, and focuses on examining the meaning and purpose of life. Founders of the society include former Education Minister Ovid Tzeng (曾志朗), Fu Jen Catholic University (FJCU) President Bernard Chien-chiu Li (黎建球) and Sun Hsiao-chih (孫效智), a philosophy professor at National Taiwan University (NTU). In addition to promoting academic research and exchanges in life education will cooperate with NTU and FJCU to train teachers in the discipline. The society's goal is to set up 20 seed schools to train 80 teachers in the discipline within 18 months. Sun said education reforms over the past decade have focused more on technical and institutional issues than on substantial and conceptual issues such as life education. The availability of qualified teachers will be crucial to ensuring the successful launch of life education courses in high schools, Sun added.
■ Presidential visit
Chen pays visit to east
President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) began a visit to eastern Taiwan yesterday by telling stories to children at an amusement park. Chen told stories to more than 200 children at the Hualien Ocean Park in his role as "grandpa A-bian." Although the participants were mainly children, security was tight -- a result of the March 19 assassination attempt against him. Security personnel checked the IDs and equipment of the media and the personal belongings of those attending.
■ Media
GIO slams nude news
The Government Information Office (GIO) yesterday declared that reporting about foreign nude news shows is inappropriate for cable news networks and issued a warning to the offending stations. In a statement issued yesterday night, the GIO said that cable news network SETN was violation of programming regulations for previous news reports about the nude news reporting shows sweeping the globe. The programs in question exceeded decency standards, the GIO said, and any station that breaks this rule will be will be punished accordingly. While SETN was the only network officially given a warning for the reports, the GIO statement also chastised ETToday News, ETTV, TVBS, TVBS-N, Era News, Chinese Television System, and CTI TV for similar reports.
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