ENTERTAINMENT
Pan An-pang passes away
Taiwanese singer Pan An-pang (潘安邦), known for his song Grandma’s Penghu Bay (外婆的澎湖灣), died on Sunday of kidney cancer at the age of 51. Pan, who was born in Penghu, began his singing career in 1979. Pan’s hit songs include Country Road (鄉間的小路), Sunshine and Rain (光和小雨) and Errant Love (聚散倆依依). Pan was also well-known in China and once performed Grandma’s Penghu Bay at China Central Television’s New Year’s Gala. He is survived by his wife and son.
DIPLOMACY
US charity praises Taiwan
Food for the Poor, the largest international relief and development organization in the US, on Saturday praised Taiwan for its efforts to provide foreign aid. At a fundraiser held in Florida to mark the organization’s 31st anniversary, Food for the Poor president and chief executive officer Robin Mahfood praised the nation for its participation in a program to supply rice and provide technical agricultural assistance to Haiti. Mahfood also expressed his appreciation to Taiwan’s representative office in Miami for supporting fundraising events over the past three years to help with Haiti’s post-earthquake reconstruction. Mahfood later presented a citation to Mou Hua-wei (牟華偉), director of the Miami office, in honor of his work in promoting humanitarian diplomacy. The government has engaged in several projects with Food for the Poor in Central America in recent years, including promoting computer education and aquaculture and providing emergency food supplies. During a visit to Haiti in August 2010, first lady Chow Mei-ching (周美青) joined Mahfood in distributing rice to victims of the earthquake.
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