Taiwan received three awards at the Asia-Pacific/World General Assembly of the Airport Council International (ACI) in Seoul, South Korea, on Tuesday, including accreditation of Kaohsiung International Airport’s carbon reduction management.
It was Taiwan’s first ACI airport carbon accreditation, the Civil Aeronautics Administration said.
Kaohsiung airport is certified at the Reduction level, the second in a four-level accreditation program adopted by the council to assess and recognize the efforts of airports to manage and reduce their carbon emissions, the Civil Aeronautics Administration said.
The four levels are “Mapping (level 1),” “Reduction (level 2),” “Optimization (level 3)” and “Neutrality (level 4),” according to the council, the only global trade representative of the world’s airports.
Presently, there are 99 airports around the world which have obtained airport carbon accreditation by the council, including 16 in the Asia-Pacific area.
Also at the Seoul meeting, David Fei (費鴻鈞), president and CEO of Taoyuan International Airport Co (TIAC), received the Roll of Excellence award presented by the Council’s director-general Angela Gittens in recognition of the company’s earning a top-five ranking in the category of Airport Service Quality Survey for five years.
Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, which is operated by the TIAC, was ranked third in terms of passenger traffic in last year’s Airport Service Quality Awards, with 25 million to 40 million passengers.
“The TIAC’s next goal is to take second place and it would like to share the honors with all its airport partners,” the company said in a statement yesterday.
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