CULTURE
Washington sips Taiwan tea
A Taiwanese tea ceremony was held at the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Gallery of Art in Washington on Sunday. The event, organized by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the US, was held along with a screening of the documentary film The Meaning of Tea, directed by Scott Chamberlin Hoyt, who visited Taiwan, Japan, India, the US and the UK to explore different tea cultures. Hoyt and his team visited Taiwanese tea farms and interviewed a Taiwanese tea ceremony expert, a teapot maker and tea growers to showcase Taiwan’s tea culture. Hoyt said he became curious about the origin of Taiwanese oolong tea after tasting some in the US. “Attending a tea ceremony can purify the human spirit,” Lin Ku-fang (林谷芳), a tea ceremony expert, said in the documentary.
MUSIC
Free jazz festival coming
Music fans will be treated to free concerts and performances by top artists from around the world this summer during the country’s biggest annual jazz bash, the “Summer Jazz” festival, the organizer said yesterday. The festival, to be held for the ninth year, will begin in August and will feature two free outdoor concerts and performances by Grammy Award winners Michel Camilo, Terence Blanchard, Ramsey Lewis and jazz band Yellow Jackets, the National Chang Kai-shek Cultural Center said. Daniel Shen (沈鴻元), a DJ who has introduced artists to festival audiences for years, said the four musicians represent four types of jazz music — Latin, contemporary, conventional and fusion — an ideal mix. The three-hour outdoor concerts on Aug. 19 and Aug. 20 will feature local artists as well as Japanese star Saori Sano and US jazz trumpeter Michael Philip Mossman. The festival runs through Sept. 9 at the National Concert Hall.
WOMEN
No ‘SlutWalk’ for Taiwan
Taiwanese women’s groups have no plans to organize a “SlutWalk” movement along the lines of international protests to combat the misapprehension that women’s appearances might explain or excuse sex crimes against them, local groups said yesterday. Even though local women’s rights groups are in favor of the global phenomenon and agree with the premise, there will be no such movement in Taiwan in the next few months. “We’re very much aligned with this appeal,” Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation executive director Kang Shu-hua (康淑華) said. “We firmly believe that a woman’s appearance should not make her subject to victimization.” However, after discussing the issue with other foundation members, Kang said that she regretted that the foundation would not be able to hold a “SlutWalk” because there were not enough staff members to hold the walk.
HEALTH
German bean sprouts banned
The government yesterday announced that imports of bean sprouts from Germany would be suspended, effective today. Bean sprouts grown in Germany have been blamed for the world’s worst-ever E. coli outbreak, which has caused more than 35 deaths and has infected more than 3,000 people, international media reports have said. The Department of Health said the measure was taken merely as a precaution, as German bean sprouts have not been imported into Taiwan for the last two years. The department’s Food and Drug Administration said the import ban would cover both mung bean sprouts and soy bean sprouts.
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