AGRICULTURE
Bacteria hampers chestnuts
Malabar chestnut plants, one of the major exports of Changhua County, are being affected by unknown bacteria that has hurt yields and sales, Hsichou Township (溪州) chief Huang Sheng-lu (黃盛祿) said earlier this month. Since July last year, the popular pot plants grown in Hsichou have often been returned by foreign buyers because of complaints about root and bark quality, Huang said. The town has 650 hectares of the trees under cultivation, accounting for about 80 percent of the nation’s overall production. The infected chestnuts usually do not appear sick until shipped to distribution centers or abroad, resulting in costly losses for farmers, Huang said. Farmers said fusarium, a fungus often found in soil, could be behind the outbreak, although Chen Bao-liang (陳保良), an official with the Council of Agriculture’s Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine, said the actual cause of the disease was still being investigated.
POPULATION
Aboriginal numbers rise
The nation’s Aboriginal population reached 512,701 at the end of last year, up 1.6 percent from the year before, statistics by the Ministry of the Interior showed over the weekend. The average age of Aboriginal people stood at 32.5 years, 5.6 years younger than that of the country’s overall population, which numbered 23,162,123 at the end of last year. Hualien County boasted the largest number of Aboriginal residents, with 90,929 or 17.7 percent of the total Aboriginal population, followed by Taitung County with 80,152 or 15.6 percent and Taoyuan County with 59,321 or 11.6 percent. Among the 14 officially recognized Aboriginal tribes, Amis is the largest, with 187,763 people or 36.6 percent of the overall Aboriginal population. Paiwan came in second, with 81,552 (15.9 percent), followed by Atayal, with 81,552 people (15.9 percent.)
SOCIETY
Elderly volunteer honored
An 83-year-old woman, who yesterday was given an award for her years of volunteer work at a cultural center in Greater Taichung, said helping others had boosted her energy. Cheng Wu Chiao-niang(鄭巫嬌娘), the oldest volunteer at the Dadun Culture Center, received an award from Greater -Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強), who praised her spirit at such a venerable age. The spirit of volunteer service is hard enough to come by, but the commitment of senior volunteers was even more praiseworthy and sets a good example, Hu said. Cheng Wu takes a bus every Thursday to get to downtown Taichung, which is about a three-hour journey from her home. “I view the volunteer work as a break, so I do not feel it is a waste of time,” Cheng Wu said.
CULTURE
Village to hold festival: Chen
Greater Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) yesterday vowed to help the remaining residents of Siaolin Village (小林) continue to hold the Siraya Night Festival (小林夜祭). Chen said after the permanent housing for residents of Wulipu Village (五里埔) was completed, the city government would launch a campaign to help promote the festival because the celebration was an important asset of the Aboriginal community. The new housing, which is 3km away from the village, is part of the government’s reconstruction work in the areas hit by mudslides induced by rain brought by Typhoon Morakot in August 2009. The village was almost completely wiped out by landslides.
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