The Oceanographic Society yesterday asked the US-based Ocean Sciences Meeting to distinguish Taiwan from China, after the event organizer advised speakers from China and Taiwan to “discuss alternative arrangements” amid an outbreak of the 2019 novel coronavirus.
The event, which is to run from Sunday next week to Feb. 21 at the San Diego Convention Center in California, is cosponsored by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) — an international nonprofit scientific association with nearly 60,000 members from 137 nations.
The meeting’s Web site posted an announcement describing its response to the outbreak.
“We have contacted conveners and speakers who are from designated countries, currently China and Taiwan, to discuss alternative arrangements,” it said. “We suggest visiting the World Health Organization’s Web site, which is constantly being updated with the latest information and tips.”
Taiwan’s confirmed cases of the disease have been listed as part of China’s in the WHO’s situation reports.
Upon seeing the message, the society wrote to the AGU, suggesting that it consider excluding Taiwan from its announcement, society chairman Jan Sen (詹森) wrote on Facebook yesterday.
As of Friday, Taiwan had only confirmed 16 coronavirus cases, which were all linked to travelers returning from overseas, and the disease is well under control in Taiwan, he wrote.
More than 20 academics from National Taiwan University, National Taiwan Ocean University and National Sun Yat-sen University are expected to attend the meeting, Jan told the Taipei Times.
As the organizer has not banned Taiwanese attendees, they would stick to their original plan to give presentations at the meeting, he said.
They also aim to discuss collaboration with members of the US National Science Foundation and the US Navy’s Office of Naval Research, he added.
Some long-term collaborators at the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution also wrote to the organizer to protest the error, but have only received automated responses, Jan said.
Such a misunderstanding had not been encountered when dealing with US events, although it is a common practice of UN-affiliated events and documents to block Taiwan, he said.
LATE CHANGE
After receiving complaints from Taiwanese and US scientists, the AGU on Sunday removed Taiwan from its Web site announcement, advising that only conveners and speakers coming from China should discuss alternative arrangements.
This story has been updated since it was first published.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS