AVIATION
EVA plane clips tail
EVA Airways said yesterday that no injuries were reported after one of its Boeing 747 cargo jets clipped the tail of an American Eagle passenger flight at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on Wednesday. The carrier said all three crew members on its cargo flight 661, as well as 18 passengers and three crew members on Eagle flight 4265 — a much smaller Embraer 140 — were unhurt. The accident occurred at 12:42pm, when the EVA flight was about to depart for Anchorage, Alaska. When taxiing for takeoff, the aircraft’s right wing clipped the rudder of the Eagle jet, which had just landed. According to EVA, the incident is being investigated by the US National Transportation Safety Board. The carrier has sent an MD-11 cargo plane with a repair unit to help transport the cargo the plane was carrying.
POLITICS
Web site offers ‘Ma vision’
A new video section was added to the Presidential Office Web site yesterday, offering the public what the office said would be “a view through the eyes of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).” A series of two-minute videos will be posted on the site at irregular intervals, allowing the public to see how Ma deals with different people and situations. Presidential Office spokesman Fan Chiang Tai-chi (范姜泰基) said the aim was to record Ma’s interaction and dialogue with the public, because listening to the voices of the people at the grassroots level is a core component of his policy and decisionmaking process. “All hardworking Taiwanese” will be the protagonists of the videos, and their stories will show the Taiwanese hard work ethic, optimism and the hardships they suffer, he 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