■EVENTS
AmCham Taichung plans Independence Day party
The American Chamber of Commerce Taichung invites the public to celebrate US Independence Day on Saturday. The free event is one of Taichung’s biggest annual international celebrations and will feature live bands, food, drinks, vendors, games and other fun, the event’s organizer said. The festivities will be held at Nan Yuan Park next to Costco from 2pm to 9pm. Volunteers are still needed for the event. For details, visit www.amchamtaichung.org.
■RESOURCES
Kaohsiung County sets up group to aid foreign spouses
A 90-member group was recently set up to help foreign wives in Kaohsiung County, with 33 new female immigrants among its members. There are more than 20,000 foreign spouses in Kaohsiung County, with 7,200 of them from Southeast Asian countries, the county government said. Liu Chin-tian (劉進添), head of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) local committee, said some 258,000 children have been born to the 408,547 foreign spouses in Taiwan, and that newborns of these new female immigrants account for more than 10 percent of births in the country every year. This underlined the ever-growing significance of new immigrants, and assisting foreign spouses of Taiwanese citizens had become a very important task that the ruling party could not ignore, he said.
■OPEN CALL
Taipei Artist Village announces open call for 2010 residencies
The Taipei Artist Village (TAV), a non-governmental organization, announced its 2010 Artist-in-Residence open call for international and local artists to submit proposals related to art and culture, the creative industry and interdisciplinary business-art collaborations. Applications and portfolios including a maximum of six pieces of work submitted on a PC-compatible CD-ROM, DVD or VCD from the last two years of the artist’s work, or excerpts from up to six pieces of work, should be presented in English and sent by post, the TAV said in a press statement. Applicants must have a minimum of three years experience or professional practice, while students, as well as grantees from 2007 and last year, are not eligible to apply. The application deadline for both domestic and international programs is July 31, and decisions on the successful applicants will be announced by October on the TAV’s Web site.
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