■ SOCIETY
Cyclist hit in Siberia
A man cycling from Taiwan to Moscow made it as far as Siberia only to be knocked off his bicycle by a drunk driver, Russian media reported on Monday. The 37-year-old Taiwanese man, who was not named, had completed nearly two-thirds of his route on the 7,000km trip when he was hit by a car in the Novosibirsk region, Interfax news agency reported. "The victim is currently in a satisfactory condition ... The drunk driver fled from the scene of the accident," the agency quoted police as saying.
■ LABOR
CLA head visits workplaces
Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) Chairman Lu Tien-lin (盧天麟) inspected foreign laborers' workplaces in Taoyuan County to learn firsthand about their working conditions. Lu visited the Fulltide Enterprise Co in Tayuan Township (大園) and the Catholic Hope Workers Center in Chungli (中壢). Officials at both the enterprise and the center briefed him and and he examined laborers' working and living environments, which he found satisfactory. Lu asked three foreign laborers about their employers and living and working environments, and received positive evaluations from all three.
■ HEALTH
Visitors warned about Bali
Travelers planning trips to Bali, Indonesia, should be careful, the Department of Health said on Monday, after the Indonesian government confirmed the first human death from avian influenza on the island. Deputy director of the department's Centers for Disease Control Chou Chih-hao (周志浩) urged tourists to avoid contact with fowl and raw fowl products and to wash their hands and change clothes immediately if they come in contact with bird droppings. Anyone who does not feel well within 10 days of returning should seek medical treatment immediately, Chou said. The death took place about 100km outside Denpasar, the capital of Bali, but the health department is not advising tourists against visiting the town, but rather urging them to exercise caution, he said. Avian influenza virus usually refers to Influenza A viruses found chiefly in birds, but infections can occur in humans.
■ DEFENSE
Delegation heads to US
A legislative delegation was set to leave on an 11-day visit to the US yesterday to assess the possibility of purchasing eight US-built diesel-electric submarines, Legislative Yuan National Defense Committee sources said on Monday. The delegation, composed of legislators from across the party spectrum, will visit Washington and Boston, Massachusetts, as well as making a transit stop in Los Angeles, California, the sources said. The group canceled its plan to tour a US military base in Hawaii. Because of media criticism and partisan disputes over the trip, the sources said, Vice Minister of National Defense Ko Cheng-heng (柯承亨) canceled plans to join the group and the trip has been shortened. The sources said that an Aug. 7 meeting between legislative and military staff decided the delegation would consist of nine lawmakers, including Liao Wan-ju (廖婉汝) and Shui Hua-min (帥化民) from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), Shen Fa-hui (沈發惠) and Chang Hua-kuan (張花冠) from the Democratic Progressive Party and Ho Ming-hao (何敏豪) of the Taiwan Solidarity Union. In response to criticism that the trip is a waste of taxpayers' money, the sources said legislators must foot part of their travel bills themselves.
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