POLITICS
Lu’s appeal rejected
Former vice president Annette Lu’s (呂秀蓮) appeal of the Executive Yuan’s rejection of her New Taipei City (新北市) anti-nuclear referendum proposal in May has been dismissed by the Ministry of the Interior’s Petition and Appeals Committee. The committee said Lu’s proposal to hold a referendum on the installation of fuel rods at the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in the city’s Gongliao District (貢寮) could not be approved because it was related to national energy policy and was therefore not a local issue. Lu launched a similar proposal in May for a Taipei plebiscite, which is still in the petition phase.
ENTERTAINMENT
LeAnn Rimes to play Taipei
US singer LeAnn Rimes is to give her first performance in Taiwan next month in Taipei. The 31-year-old Grammy-winning artist is scheduled to sing at Taipei Arena on Nov. 16, her only stop in Asia on her current world tour, according to concert organizer KHAM. Rimes rose to fame at the age of 13 with her cover of the Bill Mack song Blue in 1996 and became the youngest Grammy winner ever the following year. She has sold more than 37 million records worldwide and is best known for the hit songs Can’t Fight the Moonlight and How Do I Live.
EARTHQUAKE
Small temblor jolts south
A magnitude 4.7 earthquake jolted southern Taiwan at 3:50am yesterday, the Central Weather Bureau said. The quake’s epicenter was in the sea, about 63.6km south of Greater Kaohsiung’s City Hall, at a depth of 56km, bureau officials said. Greater Kaohsiung and Pingtung County’s offshore Liuqiu Township (琉球鄉) were hit by the tremors most strongly, but at an intensely level of one, most residents would not have noticed them.
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