TOURISM
Expo to benefit Yunlin
The Yunlin Agriculture Expo is expected to inject more than NT$2.3 billion (US$78.4 million) into Yunlin County’s economy during its Dec. 25 to March 6 run, a county official said on Monday. The event is forecast to generate net economic benefits of NT$1.876 billion once construction and other costs are deducted, said Chen Tung-sung (陳東松), head of the county’s Planning Department. Chen said he expected the planned expo to be the most effective investment the county government has ever made because the money injected into the local economy as a result of the expo could be up to four times the total investment in the project. The estimates were based on a 2011 Tourism Bureau survey on domestic travel habits, value-added tables for different sub-sectors from the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics and an estimate that the expo is likely to attract at least 500,000 visitors, Chen said.
TRAVEL
Visa-free destination added
Taiwanese now enjoy visa-free treatment from 134 countries and territories following an announcement by Montserrat, a British overseas territory in the Caribbean, that it has extended visa-free privileges to Taiwanese, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Monday. Montserrat authorities recently decided to grant visa-free treatment to Republic of China (ROC) passport holders, the ministry said in a statement. Under the program, Taiwanese are allowed to stay in Montserrat for up to six months without a visa, it added. Montserrat is the eighth British overseas territory to grant visa-free entry to ROC passport holders, according to the ministry. With an area of 102km2, Montserrat has a population of about 5,000.
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,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read: