■ POLITICS
Chen, Wu miss court date
Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and his wife, Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍), did not show up for a hearing yesterday in which the pair were summoned as witnesses. The Taiwan High Court asked the pair to testify in a slander case that Chen filed against Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chiu Yi (邱毅). The high court said yesterday it would summon the pair again. In February 2000, Chiu, a campaign spokesman for independent presidential candidate James Soong (宋楚瑜), accused Wu of possessing NT$75 million (US$2.4 million) in investments and linked her fortune to a stock market speculator nicknamed “Ah Ting” (阿丁). Chen’s camp denied the charges and accused Chiu of violating the Election and Recall Law.
■ POLITICS
Premier to give report
Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) will deliver his first administrative report at the Legislative Yuan on Friday and Tuesday next week, a statement issued by the legislature said yesterday. The legislature’s Procedure Committee completed the agenda yesterday for the plenary sessions on the same days and invited Liu to deliver his report and answer questions from lawmakers. The committee also included an amendment to a law governing the behavior of legislators. Proposed by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wong Chin-chu (翁金珠), the measure would specify how lawmakers who hold foreign citizenship would be disciplined. If the amendment passes, violators will be removed from office and have to return all earnings received while in office.
■ DIPLOMACY
MOFA names new staff
Sun Ta-cheng (孫大成), head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ (MOFA) Central Taiwan Office, has been named the new ambassador to Guatemala in the first wave of diplomatic personnel reshuffles under new Minister of Foreign Affairs Francisco Ou (歐鴻鍊), the ministry announced yesterday. Ou served as the representative to Guatemala before being appointed head of the ministry earlier this month. Sun was a deputy division chief and then division chief in Taiwan’s representative office in the US before taking over as director of MOFA’s Department of General Affairs. Sun was Taiwan’s ambassador to the Dominican Republic and then top representative to Chile before he was appointed to head the Central Taiwan Office in January. Meanwhile, Wu Chien-kuo (吳建國), a former deputy representative to Thailand, has been named the new deputy director of the ministry’s NGO Affairs Committee, replacing Vanessa Shih (史亞平), who was appointed Government Information Office head.
■ POLITICS
Chen weighs in on secrets
Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) yesterday said that whether President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) could declassify the documents relating to his controversial “state affairs fund” and listed by him as confidential was a constitutional issue. Chen issued a statement saying that he identified those documents as classified during his presidency and the courts and prosecutors have asked Ma to declassify them. However, whether the Presidential Office or prosecutors have the right to challenge the presidential authority is a dilemma, Chen said, and it is a constitutional issue whether the new president has the right to declassify documents listed as confidential by previous presidents. Chen said it would be an overt violation of the principle of separation of powers if the judiciary intervened in presidential authority.
■ SOCIETY
Man joins girlfriend in freezer
A man grieving over the death of his girlfriend climbed inside a morgue freezer to be with her and was pulled out alive half an hour later, media and an official said yesterday. The 41-year-old man was discovered on Monday when workers detected an unusually high temperature in the freezer and realized the hatch was not securely fastened. “A morgue manager opened the hatch, saw two people lying inside, felt scared enough to yell out and then even cried,” the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) reported. “She didn’t calm down for a long time.” The man took a drug before entering the freezer to speed what appeared to be a suicide attempt, local papers said. They said his girlfriend had died on Friday from an overdose of sleeping pills. The morgue would step up security to ensure that family and others who come by to identify bodies do not stay too long, morgue administrator Cheng Ching-yuan (鄭景源) said.
■ HISTORY
Stamps, sheet to be issued
Taiwan Post is set to issue a set of two stamps and a souvenir sheet on Friday to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the National Taiwan Museum. The set includes an NT$5 stamp featuring the Yellow Tiger Flag of Democratic Taiwan and a NT$25 stamp featuring a portrait of Koxinga (1368-1644), the famous Ming general who drove the Dutch out of Taiwan. The background of the Koxinga stamp features part of a map of Taiwan dating from the Emperor Kangxi’s reign during the Qing Dynasty. The souvenir sheet’s background includes the same map as well as a picture of the museum in the upper left corner and the museum’s centenary logo in the upper right corner.
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