■ AVIATION
Paramedic’s body recovered
The body of paramedic Hsu Huan-mao (許煥懋) and the black box from the Sunrise Airlines Co helicopter that crashed on Kinmen on Friday were retrieved from the wreckage yesterday. Aviation Safety Council investigator Li Pao-kang (李寶康) said the black box would be sent to the council in the hope that the communications record and flight data would shed some light on the causes of the accident. The helicopter was on its way back to Kinmen following a mission when it crashed in the sea off Shangyi Airport at 4:20am on Friday morning. Pilot Chao Chia-jui (趙家瑞) survived the crash and was rescued, while copilot Wu Chao-kang’s (吳照剛) body was retrieved on Friday.
■ TOURISM
Janice Lai to visit Beijing
Tourism Bureau Director General Janice Lai (賴瑟珍) is planning to leave for Beijing on Friday, where she is scheduled to meet with China’s National Tourism Administration Director Shao Qiwei (邵琪偉). Lai will meet with Shao as Taiwan Strait Tourism Association chairwoman and Shao, in turn, as Cross-Strait Travel Exchange Association chairman. “The focus will be on elevating the quality of travel for Chinese tourists, not on increasing the numbers,” Lai said in press briefing last week. She said statistics from China showed that the number of Chinese tourists traveling overseas had dropped by 50 percent last month. She said the bureau estimates that numbers would start rebounding next month and though the nation has seen a decline in the numbers of Chinese tourists, the average number of had returned to about 1,000 per day last week. Some Taiwanese travel agents have complained that they are not receiving payments from Chinese travel agencies who have sent tour groups. Lai said while she would advise Chinese officials of the problem, travel agents cannot hold the government accountable for their not being able to collect payments from their Chinese counterparts. “The travel agents must be careful when choosing their partners,” she said. As more travel agencies face financial problems amid the recession, Lai said the bureau has consulted with the Ministry of Economic Affairs to offer subsidies on interest payments.
■ CULTURE
Chiayi to host conference
The mayor of Chiayi signed an agreement with World Association for Symphonic Bands and Ensembles (WASBE) chairman Leon Bly on Saturday to host the association’s conference in 2011. Mayor Huang Min-hui (黃敏惠) signed the agreement while attending the July 5 to July 11 WASBE conference in Cincinnati, Ohio, finalizing a bid that began when Chiayi won the right to host the 2011 event at the 2007 conference in the Irish town of Killarney. The first WASBE conference was held in the Norwegian city of Skien in 1983 and since then, composers, performers, publishers, music teachers and instrument makers have met every two years in either Europe, Africa, North America or Asia. Chiayi City, which has sponsored wind band festivals annually since 1993.
■ ENVIRONMENT
Beach blaze contained
A blaze broke out on a beach on the north coast in the early hours of Saturday, but firefighters extinguished it before it became dangerous, local police said. A witness said he saw a group of teenagers barbecuing at the beach and that they had probably failed to extinguish a fire before they left. The blaze occurred not far from Fulong Beach in Gongliao Township, the venue of the three-day Ho-Hai-Yan Rock Festival.
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