SOCIETY
BCCT to host charity dinner
The British Chamber of Commerce in Taipei (BCCT) is holding a charity cocktail party to raise funds for Harmony Home, a non-profit organization that provides assistance to men, women and children living with HIV/AIDS. The cocktail party will be held on Friday from 7pm to 10pm at Lili. For registration, call the BCCT at (02) 2547-1199.
TRADE
Canadian trade chief to talk at AmCham meet
The American Chamber of Commerce in Taichung is holding a dinner meeting at 7pm next Tuesday. The guest speaker for the night is Ron Macintosh, director of the Canadian Trade Office in Taiwan, who will give a talk on Global Recession, Cross-Straits Change, and Canada-Taiwan Ties: Sustaining Progress Amid Challenge. The cost for the dinner is NT$700 for AmCham members and NT$800 for non-members. For more information, call River Chen at 0955-038-733 or (04) 2471-8133, or visit www.amchamtaichung.org.
LEISURE
Master chef to present Swiss cuisine
The Trade Office of Swiss Industries and the International Food Cultural Exchange will jointly present a cooking demonstration of authentic Swiss cuisine on Friday in Taipei. The activity will take place from 3:30pm to 5pm on the third floor of Eslite Bookstore in Xinyi District (信義). W. Isler, the master chef invited to do the cooking demonstration, has 35 years of experience in four and five-star hotels in Europe. Admission is free, but seats are limited, the organizer said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift