■TRANSPORTATION
Final check for Neihu Line
The Taipei City MRT’s Muzha Line will suspend service tomorrow for a final round of inspections on the Neihu Line before it opens later this month. The Neihu Line connects Zhongshan Junior High School Station on the Muzha Line with the Blue Line that runs east and west across the city. Taipei City’s Department of Rapid Transit Systems said the Ministry of Transportation and Communications will conduct the Neihu Line’s final safety inspection tomorrow. Free shuttles will run between 6am and midnight along Xinhai and Jungong roads tomorrow. Services will be available every one to two minutes during peak hours and every five minutes during off-peak hours. The free shuttles will stop at each MRT station instead of the regular bus stops.
■UTILITIES
Taiwan Water pans plan
The Cabinet has asked Taiwan Water Corp to come up with an incentive program that will reduce water consumption, but Taiwan Water’s chairman yesterday said such a move would deepen the company’s losses. Water Resources Agency Director Chen Shen-hsien (陳伸賢) said Premier Liu Chao-hsiuan (劉兆玄) had asked the water company to devise discounts that would encourage water conservation, possibly mirroring those offered by Taiwan’s power utility to reduce electricity consumption. However, Taiwan Water Corp chairman Liao Tsung-sheng (廖宗盛) reacted negatively to the proposed plan. He said the company had been suffering financially even before industrial water consumption declined by 20 percent in the first five months of this year as a result of the global economic downturn.
■HEALTH
CDC announces 17th case
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday cautioned people traveling to the Philippines after announcing the 17th confirmed A (H1N1) influenza patient in Taiwan, a four-year-old Filipino-Taiwanese boy. CDC spokesman Shih Wen-yi (施文儀) said he suspected that the situation in the Philippines was serious, as WHO statistics showed that three Taiwanese, one South Korean, one Japanese, one Singaporean and one Saudi Arabian had contracted the virus in the past two weeks during trips there. Shih said the boy traveled to the Philippines with his parents on May 15 and returned to Taiwan last Saturday. The boy’s parents are receiving a 10-day course of preventative medicine, Shih said.
■JUSTICE
KRTC ruling changed
The original sentence of former director of Kaohsiung City’s Bureau of Urban Development Wu Meng-te (吳孟德) was reduced from 12 years in prison to 18 months in the second ruling of the Kaohsiung Rapid Transit Corp (KRTC) bribery case, which was announced by the Taiwan High Court’s Kaohsiung branch yesterday. Wu, former Ministry of Transportation and Communications secretary-general Chung Shan-tun (鍾善藤) and former New Culture Foundation chairman Chang Chi-rong (張志榮) were found guilty by the Kaohsiung District Court of taking bribes in connection with the KRTC scandal. The High Court yesterday also overturned the district’s ruling and found Chung and Chang, who were sentenced to four years and eight months respectively in the first trial, not guilty. The court said it gave a much lighter sentence to Wu because he did not have a public position at that time, and found Chung and Chang not guilty because they were not civil servants.
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