SOCIETY
Tibet memorial planned
Tibetans and Tibet activists will hold a memorial service for the Dalai Lama’s 45-year-old nephew Jigme Norbu, who was killed in a car accident on Monday during his “Walk for Tibet” campaign in Florida. In the past 19 walks, Jigme had walked more than 12,000km to promote independence for Tibet and raise public awareness on the Tibet issue. Before launching the latest walk in Florida on Monday, Jigme’s last completed campaign was a 400km walk over 13 days from Taipei to Kaohsiung in December. The memorial service — organized by people who accompanied him on the walk in December — will take place on Saturday at 7pm at the Religious Foundation of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Rooms 4 and 5 on the 10th Floor, No. 189, Keelung Rd, Sec. 2.
TOURISM
Singers to tout Taiwan
Taiwan has invited Japanese enka singer Sachiko Kobayashi and Jiro Wang (汪東城) of the Taiwanese boy band Fahrenheit to promote regional tourism in Taiwan, a Tourism Bureau official said yesterday. The popular entertainers will tout Taiwan’s tourism throughout the year, said Chiang Ming-ching (江明清), a bureau division chief. Fahrenheit is popular among young girls in South Korea, which is why Wang was selected to serve as a “tourism ambassador” for that country, Chiang said. Citing bureau statistics, Chiang said the number of Japanese tourists reached 1.08 million people last year, representing annual growth of 7 percent, while the number of South Korean tourists grew by 26.8 percent. The bureau expressed hope that the number of visitors from the two countries would further increase this year, he added.
AGRICULTURE
Cold weather leads to losses
The agricultural sector has suffered losses of roughly NT$227.6 million (US$7.7 million) over the past month, with low temperatures brought by cold fronts damaging crops and fish farms in some areas, the Council of Agriculture said. As of yesterday, financial losses from crop damage had reached NT$88.42 million, with a total of 1,257 hectares of agricultural land affected, the council said. The heaviest damage was to high-stem grafted pears, wax apples and Hai-li tangors, the council said. In the fisheries industry, total losses of NT$139.22 million were reported. Penghu County, the worst-hit area in the sector, suffered losses of NT$87.91 million. The council said it has approved plans to subsidize tangor farmers in Hsinchu County and compensate the Penghu fisheries industry with cash and low--interest loans after the affected areas have been inspected.
POLITICS
DPP focusing on elections
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) announced yesterday that it plans to nominate up to 40 seats in the next legislative elections though the use of direct selections rather than party primaries. The 40 seats are included in the DPPs’ definition of “hard-to-win districts,” where party candidates took less than 42.5 percent of the vote during the previous round of elections, party officials said. They added that the method would enable the DPP to better nominate “suitable” candidates, including possibly some who are not currently party members. Four of the seats, spokesperson Lin Yu-chang (林右昌) said, would be allocated to the Taiwan Solidarity Union, with which the DPP has an agreement. Included among the “hard-to-win districts” are 14 in Taipei and New Taipei City (新北市), both Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) strongholds.
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,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read: