SPORT SPORT
Wheelchair team departs
Taiwan’s wheelchair tennis players took off yesterday for the 2011 Peace Cup in Japan, an important chance for them to earn ranking points for next year’s Paralympic Games, the Taipei Wheelchair Tennis Association (TWTA) said. The US$15,000 ITF 2 Series tournament will take place from today until Sunday in Hiroshima Regional Park. The tournament will offer more ranking points than the Taipei Open played from Sept. 29 through Oct. 2 in Taiwan, where Taiwanese players won two events and were finalists in two others. Women’s players Lu Chia-yi (呂嘉儀) and Wu Yi-shan (吳宜珊), ranked 45th and 39th in the world respectively, took the top two spots in the women’s singles and reached the finals of the doubles at the Taipei Open, and the TWTA said the two could qualify early for next year’s Paralympics with good performances in Japan. The Taipei Open was an ITF 3 Series event, one notch below the ITF 2 rating for the Peace Open.
TAIPEI CITY
Bike rentals expanded
The Taipei City Government said yesterday that its YouBike rental system in Xinyi District (信義) has expanded its services to infrequent riders to help boost its usage rate. The new service will now require no basic minimum rental period, deposit or membership registration, and commuters will only have to pay the regular fee of NT$10 per 15 minutes, the city government said. However, the city’s Department of Transportation said those who wish to use the service still have to get their Easycards registered at the YouBike service center or submit an online form. YouBike, which has 11 rental stations and 500 bicycles, was launched in 2009 as part of efforts to promote the city as an eco-friendly international metropolis. Its satisfaction rate has reached almost 80 percent among its users, the city said.
DIPLOMACY
Academy Web site launched
Officials yesterday unveiled a Web site and plans for the establishment of “Taiwan Academy” centers in the US to promote Taiwan’s culture and language. The initiative will help let the world know about Taiwan’s achievements, Minister without Portfolio Ovid Tzeng (曾志朗) said. “We can tell the world how we reached where we are and how we plan to go global,” he said. The Web site allows users to access Taiwanese studies and Chinese learning resources, as well as images and descriptions of Taiwan’s paintings, calligraphy and antiquities. It also showcases the nation’s flora and fauna and provides links to e-books and online magazines that introduce Taiwan. The government will open three Taiwan Academies in New York, Los Angeles and Houston tomorrow. The centers will feature a variety of exhibitions, conferences, film screenings and cultural activities as well as offer scholarships worth more than NT$640 million (US$21.06 million) each year to academics and students interested in studying Taiwan and Sinology.
GOVERNMENT
E-services to be improved
Taiwan is planning to implement a new stage of its e-government project within five years that will integrate government information and services, a top official said yesterday. The fourth phase of the program is expected to be carried out between next year and 2016 with a budget of nearly NT$8.5 billion, the official said at the 45th annual conference of the International Council for Information Technology in Government Administration in Taipei. The conference has attracted government information technology agencies from 17 countries.
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