POLITICS
Chen not beaten in prison
The office of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) yesterday rebutted an op-ed article that said Chen was beaten and discriminated against in prison. “It was a completely groundless rumor,” Chiang Chih-ming (江志銘), secretary of Chen’s office and a Taipei City councilor, said in response to an op-ed piece published by the Chinese-language Taiwan Times yesterday. Tsai Tien-li (蔡天禮), a self-proclaimed researcher at an unidentified university, wrote in an opinion piece that Chen, who is serving a 17-and-a-half-year sentence at Taipei Prison for corruption, was beaten in prison and that inmates spit and urinated on his food. According to Chiang, Taiwan North Society chairman Chou Fu-nan (周福南) visited Chen yesterday afternoon and asked Chen about what was described in Tsai’s article. Chen denied it, saying he was neither beaten nor mistreated by other inmates, but added it was true that the roof of his room was leaking, Chiang said.
CRIME
Pingtung speaker guilty
Suspended Pingtung County Council speaker Lin Ching-tu (林清都) was yesterday sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison for vote-buying when he was running for the position last year. The Taiwan High Court’s Kaohsiung branch handed down the verdict, which also includes a fine of NT$2.5 million (US$82,450). Lin’s secretary, Huang Chung-yu (黃宗裕), said Lin would file an appeal. Lin was found guilty by the Pingtung District Court in May of bribing councilors during his campaign for the council speaker election on March 1 last year. The court sentenced him to six years in prison and a fine of NT$3 million. He was then suspended from his duties by the Ministry of the Interior.
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