■DIPLOMACY
Visa free entry extended
Holders of Holy See diplomatic and official passports as well as regular Vatican passport holders will be granted visa-free entry to Taiwan for short stays, with immediate effect, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday. The move is part of efforts to cement bilateral relations and promote exchanges, the ministry said. It said holders of Holy See diplomatic and official passports can enter Taiwan without visas for visits of up to 90 days, while for regular Vatican passport holders the maximum stay without a visa will be 30 days. The Vatican is the only European state that maintains formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Officials said the level of engagement between Taiwan and the Vatican has risen in frequency and importance. Vatican heavyweights, Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes and Rino Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, have visited Taiwan this year, the officials said. The Pontifical Council convened the 2009 Spiritual Exercise for the Leaders of the Church’s Charitable Organization in Taipei earlier this month, bringing together 450 charity executives from 29 countries.
■CRIME
Police raid meth factory
Three men were arrested in Pingtung County in a recent raid by the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau on a factory manufacturing methamphetamine, the bureau said in a statement yesterday. The bureau’s Southern Mobile Unit seized 386kg of liquefied methamphetamine and equipment used to produce the drug during the raid, the statement said. Officers said the factory was in a building in an area between the townships of Linyuan (林園) and Jiadong (佳冬) badly hit by flooding after Typhoon Morakot. The men took advantage of the fact that the police were busy with rescue and recovery missions to expand production, officers said. The factory is one of the largest meth labs discovered in the south in recent years.
■HEALTH
Students hospitalized
Nearly 100 elementary school students in Taichung City and County remained hospitalized yesterday after falling ill on Friday with symptoms suggesting food poisoning, said Taichung City Public Health Bureau officials. Soon after eating lunch boxes provided by an outside contractor, students at Tanyang and Rueisuei elementary schools in Taichung County and Ssu Chang Li Elementary School in Taichung City were taken to hospital with fevers, bellyaches and diarrhea, officials said.
■POLITICS
Appointments proposed
Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) proposed the appointment of deputies of several ministries to President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) for approval last night. Liang Chi-yuan (梁啟源), previously a research fellow at the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica and recently appointed as member of the National Security Council, will become minister without portfolio of the Executive Yuan. Chu Chin-peng (朱景鵬), president of College of Humanities and Social Science of National Dong Hwa University, will become minister of the Research, Development, and Evaluation Commission; Lin Sheng-chung (林聖忠), incumbent administrative vice minister of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, will be promoted to political vice minister of the ministry. Two of the three political vice chairmen, Liu Te-hsun (劉德勳) and Mainland Affairs Council Chao Chien-min (趙建民), will stay in the same position, while Fu Dong-cheng (傅棟成) will leave.
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