Taiwan shared how it has employed technology to fight the spread of COVID-19 at an APEC meeting in Malaysia, winning praise from member states, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday.
After Chile gave up hosting last year’s APEC summit and climate summit due to social unrest, Malaysia took over hosting November’s APEC summit.
Since Feb. 3, preparatory meetings have been taking place in Putrajaya, Malaysia.
A Taiwanese delegation, led by Department of International Organizations Director-General Bob Chen (陳龍錦), participated in a meeting of APEC senior officials from Thursday to Saturday last week, department Deputy Director-General Sun Chien-yuan (孫儉元) told a regular news briefing in Taipei yesterday.
As an example of how Taiwan is assisted by technology in fighting the virus, Sun said that the government can check people’s National Health Insurance data to see if they have recently traveled to any virus-affected areas.
Taiwanese can use mobile apps to instantly get updates on the virus, information about virus transmission, and mask inventories at local drugstores and pharmacies, Sun added.
The nation’s researchers are using big data to expedite the development of drugs for treating COVID-19, he said.
Trade, investment, reform in APEC, business mobility and sustainability were the top issues at this year’s meeting, Sun said, adding that representatives from member states also expressed concern over public health, agricultural cooperation and energy.
To mitigate financial losses in the tourism industry due to the virus, representatives from Thailand suggested that APEC’s Health Working Group, Emergency Preparedness Working Group and Tourism Working Group collaborate in evaluating the effects of COVID-19 on tourism in the Asia-Pacific region and devise measures to counteract them, Sun said.
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