■ KAOHSIUNG
Free transportation offered
Kaohsiung City residents and visitors will enjoy free bus rides on national holidays next year, the city’s Transportation Bureau announced yesterday. The free rides will be offered on a total of 41 days, including the New Year holiday this Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the six-day Lunar New Year holiday, Lantern Festival, Women’s Day, Tomb Sweeping Day, Dragon Boat Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival and Double Ten National Day, the bureau said. The offer begins at midnight on Thursday, the bureau said.
■ TRAVEL
MOFA defers fee raise
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday decided to give the public two more months to apply for, or to renew their passports with an embedded computer chip at NT$1,200, delaying a planned fee hike to NT$1,600 from Jan. 1 to March 1. To encourage the public to replace their 10-year passports with chip passports, the government initially said the preferential rate would expire at the end of this year. However, the Bureau of Consular Affairs and the ministry’s offices in central, southern and eastern Taiwan have been swamped with passport applicants, with the number reaching more than 10,000 per day. The ministry’s decision came after lawmakers across party lines made a resolution on the issue at the Foreign and National Defense Committee meeting yesterday.
■ ENVIRONMENT
EPA inks waste deal
The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) yesterday announced a partnership with a number of electronics manufacturers to reduce packaging material by at least 10 percent next year. The move is expected to save up to 870 tonnes of packaging annually.
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