■ Health
Group helps quake victims
The Taiwan International Health Action (Taiwan IHA) group has dispatched a medical mission to Indonesia to help those affected by a magnitude-6.3 earthquake that rocked the country's Batusangkar District on Tuesday, leaving up to 100 dead and hundreds injured, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday. The spokesman said that the group, an ad hoc interagency body established by the Executive Yuan's Department of Health and the ministry, has sent a four-member medical team to the earthquake-affected area in West Sumatra Province to assist in disaster relief. The spokesman said the Taiwan IHA began operations in March last year to provide international humanitarian medical aid and promote medical cooperation. The group has helped international relief and disease prevention efforts on many occasions, he added.
■ Earthquakes
Moderate quake strikes
A moderate earthquake struck off northeastern Taiwan on Thursday night, meteorologists said. No damage, injuries or tsunami warning was immediately reported. The magnitude 5.2 quake hit at around 11:30pm local time and was centered at sea about 6km southeast of the coastal city of Suao, the Central Weather Bureau said in a news release. Suao is about 150km southeast of Taipei. The earthquake was felt in northern and central parts of Taiwan, the bureau said.
■ Crime
Fraud ring busted
Police recently raided a criminal ring in Taichung, arresting nine people suspected of obtaining money by fraud, mostly from people living in China, the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) said yesterday. The criminal organization, which specialized in fraud, was headed by a woman surnamed Hsieh (謝) who, together with her accomplices, employed a "phishing" scheme aimed at Chinese citizens living in inland regions, as well as major cities including Beijing and Tianjin, the CIB said. Based in Taichung, the suspects made a massive number of telephone calls through Internet phone systems to mobile phone users in China. Masquerading as bank staffers or police inspectors investigating credit card fraud, the suspects lured their victims into remitting money to a dummy bank account via ATMs. The fraud ring had made more than 1 million phone calls since last July and succeeded in defrauding their victims of about NT$100 million (US$3 million). The swindlers had also "laundered" the money by wiring it back to Taiwan via an underground remittance system, the CIB said. The suspects have been sent to the Taipei District Prosecutors' Office on charges of fraud.
■ Science
Stem-cell advances reported
A team of scientists working at the gynecology department of the National Taiwan University (NTU) has successfully produced ovarian follicles from human embryonic stem cells. The scientists said that this represented a major advancement in stem-cell research and could be a major breakthrough in the treatment of infertility. The research team added that it could also help advance future research in the field if functional egg cells could be successfully grown from the ovarian follicles. The NTU team's paper detailing its research made the cover story of last month's issue of the science journal Human Reproduction.
■ Trade
Chen lauds orchid show
President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) yesterday expressed hope that the annual Taiwan International Orchid Show (TIOS) would become a platform for sales of Taiwan-grown orchids to other countries around the world. Chen spoke of his expectations during a visit to the 2007 orchid exhibition held at the Taiwan Orchid Plantation, a biotech park in Tainan County as part of the local government's drive to promote technological research and development in orchid cultivation. Chen visited the TIOS hours before its formal opening. Speaking to reporters at the event, Chen said he was very excited to know that the number of foreign visitors to the exhibition had been doubling year on year since its debut in 2005. The boom is believed to be the best encouragement to local orchid growers and related businesses, Chen said.
■ Politics
No name-change date set
No timetable has been set for renaming the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall because certain administrative procedures have yet to be completed, an official with the Ministry of Education (MOE) said yesterday. Chu Nan-hsien (朱楠賢), director-general of the Department of Social Education, made the remarks after the MOE and several other government agencies adopted a resolution the day before to degrade the memorial hall from a third-level administrative unit to the fourth level. For any third-level administrative unit under the Executive Yuan, a set of "organic statutes" must be drafted and submitted to the Legislative Yuan for approval, while the establishment of a fourth-level unit is based upon "organizational rules," Chu explained.
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