FOOD
Cooking event held in Taipei
The three-day preliminary round of the 4th International Chinese Culinary Competition started yesterday in Taipei, attracting 72 hopefuls from Taiwan and Hong Kong, event organizer New Tang Dynasty Television said. According to the New York-based Chinese-language TV station, the competition centers on traditional Chinese dishes such as cuisines from Sichuan, Shandong and Guangdong provinces in China. Winners of the Asia-Pacific preliminary, held at Hall 2 at the Taipei World Trade Center, will book a place in the September finals to be held in New York’s Times Square.
SPORT
Ma officially opens WCBF
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Greater Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) welcomed hundreds of young baseball players from around the world to the annual World Children’s Baseball Fair (WCBF) in Kaohsiung yesterday. Ma said that hosting the event in Kaohsiung was significant because the fair had not been held outside Japan for many years. Ma described this year as a banner year for baseball in Taiwan, the nation having won the World Port Tournament in the Netherlands on July 3 and qualified for three different world series slated for next month, when teams from Taiwan will represent the Asia-Pacific region in the Little League World Series, Little League Baseball’s Junior League World Series and the Pony League’s Bronco World Series.
ECONOMY
Land leased to jewelry firms
Taitung County Government said it has rented two plots of land to international jewelry companies to build a complex consisting of a museum and shopping malls, which it hopes will help boost the local economy. The government has rented out 0.68 hectares of a 100 hectare industrial area under 50-year leases, Taitung County Commissioner Justin Huang (黃健庭) said. Although the zone offers cheap rentals at around NT$3,000 (US$104) per ping (3.3m2), only one store — RT Mart — has operated there in 16 years because of poor transport links, Huang said. The project could create 500 jobs and generate up to NT$18 million for the county in terms of rentals, land-use rights and other fees, Huang said. The project is scheduled to be completed in March next year and become a major tourism attraction, Huang said.
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