SOCIETY
Fishing skipper missing
Two Keelung-registered fishing boats collided in waters close to Huaping Island (花瓶嶼) off northern Taiwan early yesterday, tossing the crew of one boat into the water. Five crew members were rescued, but the captain is still missing. The collision occurred at about 4am. The crews of the Li Fa No. 1 (立發一號) and Hsin Ling Po 16 (新凌波16) did not seem to notice that the distance between the two boats was narrowing before the collision occurred, officials said. The Hsin Ling Po was able to rescue the Li Fa’s five crew members — one Indonesian and four Chinese — but not its 54-year-old skipper, Lin Chih-nan (林志男), Coast Guard Administration officers said. An airborne service helicopter, coast guard, navy vessels and other fishing boats were mobilized to search for Lin.
CULTURE
Win motivates practice
Pianist Wu Kuan-han (吳冠漢), who won third place in the Vienna International Piano Competition earlier this month, yesterday said that his win has motivated him to work even harder. The 28-year old Chiayi native competed against 26 musicians from eight countries in the competition, which wrapped up on Aug. 10. It was his first international competition and Wu said he felt enormous pressure, practicing almost eight hours each day beforehand. Winning third place was a valuable experience that will serve to push him to work harder, he said. He major in music at National Taiwan University of Arts and now resides in Vienna, Austria, where he has been studying under pianist Roland Batik since 2014.
HEALTH
Man dies of dengue
A Taiwanese man who was infected with dengue fever in Thailand has died, days after he was sent home for treatment, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday. It was the first dengue fever death reported in Taiwan this year, the agency said. The man, who was in his 70s, went on a business trip to Thailand in the middle of last month and came down with a fever early this month, the CDC said. He was admitted to hospital the day after he fell ill and three days later was diagnosed with dengue fever, the CDC said. By that time, he was in a semi-conscious state and was sent home on a medical charter flight, but died four days later, it said.
WEATHER
Warmer fall forecast
A warmer-than-usual autumn is likely this year due to a strong Pacific high pressure system that has lingered above Taiwan longer than expected this summer, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday. “The high pressure system should have pushed further north to Japan by now, but it remains around Taiwan,” Weather Forecast Center Director Lu Kuo-chen (呂國臣) said. The system will keep water temperatures in the northwest Pacific Ocean relatively high, which in the past has usually signaled a warmer autumn. Lu said one to two tropical storms might strike Taiwan next month or in October.
SOCIETY
Japanese athletes hailed
Some Japanese athletes competing in the Taipei Universiade have been hailed since a series of photographs of them cleaning a park was posted on social media by a New Taipei City councilor yesterday morning. The photos show the Japanese athletes using brooms and dustpans to clean Linkou Community Sports Park near the Universiade Athletes Village in New Taipei City’s Linkou District (林口).
SOCIETY
Visitor numbers fall 6%
The number of international visitors to Taiwan fell almost 6 percent in the first six months of the year, due mainly to a drop in arrivals from China, statistics from the Ministry of Transportation and Communications showed. In the year to June, visitor arrivals totaled 5.12 million, a decline of 5.7 percent from the same period last year, the data showed. Of that number, 3.61 million visited for tourism purposes, a year-on-year drop of 6.9 percent, according to the statistics. China was the largest source of visitors in the six-month period, accounting for 1.26 million, but the number was the lowest in five years and represented a 40.1 percent decline from the same period last year, the data showed. However, visitor arrivals from several other countries increased, with arrivals from South Korea rising 30.2 percent year-on-year to 530,000 in the first half, the data showed.
SOCIETY
Ministry wins award
The Ministry of the Interior has won an Asia Geospatial Excellence Award for its achievement in promoting integrated land use monitoring, the ministry said in a statement on Thursday last week. The award was presented in Putrajaya, Malaysia, on Wednesday last week as part of the annual GeoSmart Asia conference and was accepted by Cheng Tsai-tang, a deputy chief of the National Land Surveying and Mapping Center, the ministry said. The system allows authorities to compare satellite images from different times to identify ground feature changes and suspected illegal uses, center officials said. In the past, such monitoring was conducted by the Construction and Planning Agency, the Council of Agriculture’s Soil and Water Conservation Bureau and the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ Water Resources Agency.
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