■ POLITICS
First family moves in
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and his wife, Chow Mei-ching (周美青) moved into the presidential residence on Chongqing South Road, Taipei City, yesterday, after five months of renovation. The couple had been living in their own apartment in Taipei’s Muzha District (木柵) since Ma was inaugurated in May. The first family said it would move in in June, but renovation work on the sewage system delayed the plan, the Presidential Office said. The office said that the NT$8 million (US$239,000) renovation project passed inspection last week. Ma and his wife moved in with their dog, Ma Xiao-jeou (馬小九), while their two daughters are in the US and Ma’s mother lives in Muzha, the office said.
■ CULTURE
Beethoven at the TPO
The Taipei Philharmonic Orchestra (TPO), led by renowned German conductor Andreas Delfs, will perform several of Beethoven’s works during a concert tomorrow. The concert, held at Zhongshan Hall in Taipei, will feature Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3, Op. 72a, Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37, and Symphony No. 3 Eroica in E flat major, Op. 55. Chen Hung-kuan, a Taiwan-born American American who now teaches at the Shanghai Conservatory, is also scheduled to perform on the piano, while 28 hearing-impaired children will perform Beethoven’s Ode to Joy with tambourines and recorders, the orchestra said at a press conference. Ticket prices for the show, titled Invisible Heroes, range from NT$500 to NT$2,000. Delfs described the group as a “rare orchestra that plays for love and passion for the music.”
■ EDUCATION
Free composition practice
The Steering Committee for the Test of Proficiency-Huayu, a group affiliated with the Ministry of Education, will offer free online Mandarin composition practice for participants in the committee’s preliminary writing examination until Nov. 22, the committee said yesterday. Anyone wishing to take the examination can apply for an on-line account for composition practice, the committee said. Participants can begin writing on the system by using Mandarin Phonetic Symbols (注音符號) or Hanyu pinyin, the committee said, adding that participants’ performance would not influence their official test scores in the preliminary examination. More information is available at www.sc-top.org.tw/writing/login.htm.
■ BUSINESS
Pingtung bakeries suffer
Bakeries in Pingtung County are urging the government to grant them business tax exemptions or reductions because many are on the brink of bankruptcy. Pingtung County Bakery Association president Wang Chia-jung (王嘉榮) told reporters on Friday that 26 of the 220 bakery shops in the county had shut down, while many were struggling to stay in business after suffering two serious blows from contaminated material and ingredients imported from China. Wang said reports about the melamine-tainted milk power supplied by Chinese companies last month had cost the bakeries 50 percent of their business. To make the situation worse, it was reported last week that a bread raising agent, ammonium bicarbonate, imported from China was also found to contain melamine, he said. As a result, many bakeries that used to sell at least 200 pineapple cakes — their mainstay product — a day now cannot sell even one, although they have given assurances that they used yeast as the raising agent, Wang said.
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