CULTURE
Israeli troupe starts festival
Local and international performance groups organized by a Yunlin County-based arts workshop will put on a series of shows from today to Oct. 23 around the county. The Mystorin Theatre Group from Israel will take the stage during the Yunlin performance arts festival, as a warmup event of the 2013 Yunlin Agriculture Expo to be held in December in the county. The workshop, composed of mainly local dance troupes, was established to promote global arts and cultural exchanges between local and foreign performance groups by making good use of the area’s stages, props, costumes and choreographed dance pieces. To correspond with the theme of the Yunlin Agriculture Expo, the workshop will use costumes and props made with ecofriendly materials.
NATIONAL DEFENSE
Ministry denies cutbacks
The Ministry of National Defense on Friday denied a report that the Navy plans to cut the number of frigates by six to cut costs. The report in the latest edition of the China Times Weekly is “pure speculation and untrue,” the ministry said in a statement. The ministry confirmed plans that two US-made Knox-class frigates will be replaced by two Perry-class frigates that the navy is in the process of acquiring from the US. The crews of the two Knox-class frigates will be transferred to the Perry-class vessels, the ministry said, without elaborating. The ministry also denied that it was planning to downgrade the Triservice Headquarters, as was reported by the weekly. A task force is expected to complete its planning on the future force structure by March based on its assessment of threats, available resources and the military development of relevant countries.
CULTURE
Street dance contest held
A preliminary round of a New Taipei City (新北市) street dance competition took place yesterday, drawing about 400 dancers in a bid to promote Taiwanese youth culture. During a group dance session, more than 20 teams fused breakdance elements, such as pops and hip hop, which won huge applause from the audience. Now in its sixth year, the international street dance competition is aimed at making New Taipei City the capital of street dance, a city official said. The event this year will feature a special qualifying competition Nov. 2, with 70 dancers from more than 20 countries expected to compete, Chou said. The final will be held on Nov. 3, with winners from the preliminaries held in northern, central and southern Taiwan to vie for total prize money of NT$400,000.
EDUCATION
SIM university signs deal
Taiwan’s representative office in Singapore signed a memorandum of understanding with SIM University on Friday to boost cultural interaction through various activities. SIM University is the second Singaporean university, following Nanyang Technological University, to forge ties with Taiwan. Representative to Singapore Hsieh Fa-dah (謝發達) said he hoped the new platform would help make each other’s culture more vibrant and stimulate the creation of new cultural innovation businesses. Eddie Kuo, head of the university’s Centre for Chinese Studies, said the first activity to be staged dum will be a concert held before the end of the year in which singers perform songs with lyrics from poems by renowned Taiwanese writer and poet Yu Kwang-chung (余光中). A Chinese-language film festival will follow, in which films produced by Taiwanese directors will be screened, he said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift