EARTHQUAKE
Temblor near Okinawa felt
A strong magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck in waters off Okinawa at 10:59am yesterday. The quake occurred in the East China Sea, 218km west of Okinawa’s capital, Naha, and nearly 500km northeast of Taiwan. The quake’s depth was 222km. Central Weather Bureau seismologists said the temblor shook most parts of Taiwan, but its extreme depth limited the extent to which it was felt on the ground. The earthquake had an intensity of 2 in Hualien City and Orchid Island (蘭嶼) off Taitung County, and an intensity of 1 in most cities and counties from Taipei, Keelung and Yilan to Kaohsiung and Pingtung, the bureau said. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage on Okinawa or Taiwan
CULTURE
Concerts to be aired live
Taipei City Government will broadcast the Berliner Philharmoniker concerts at the National Concert Hall on Nov. 18 and Nov. 19 live at Taipei Arena, and 20,000 free tickets to the arena viewing will be given out this weekend. The live broadcasts of the concerts will be available in Taipei City, Greater Taichung, Hsinchu and Hualien County. In Taipei, the city government will broadcast the concerts on a 16m-long and 9m-wide LED screen in the arena. The Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC) said the city would give out 10,000 tickets for each concert, and tickets would be available from 9am to 5pm on Saturday at Exit 5 of Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall MRT Station and at the service desk of Taipei Arena. Any remaining tickets will distributed the following day, at the same time and same place, TRTC general manager Tan Gwa-guang (譚國光) said. Tickets will be limited to two per person.
DEFENSE
Two E-2Ts leave for retrofit
Two airborne early-warning aircraft that the US sold to the air force in the 1990s left Greater Kaohsiung for the US yesterday for upgrades, by sea. The two E-2T aircraft were flown from an airbase in Pingtung County to Kaohsiung International Airport before being towed to Kaohsiung Harbor. Military sources said the two E-2Ts will be the third and fourth to undergo retrofits in the US under an arms sale agreed to by the US in October 2008, which included an upgrade of four E-2Ts to the Hawkeye 2000 configuration at a cost of US$250 million. The first and second E-2Ts were sent to the US in June last year and are expected to return home at the end of this year. The aircraft will be refitted with more efficient eight-blade propellers and have their radar and surveillance systems upgraded.
FISHERIES
Hijacked boat back at work
The Taiwanese trawler Ching Yi Wen is once again fishing in the Indian Ocean after a brush with armed Somali pirates last weekend, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday. The 28 crewmembers, none of whom were Taiwanese, were able to overpower the pirates that hijacked the boat on Friday southeast of the Seychelles and regain control of the ship. Two Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations-authorized anti-piracy vessels escorted the Ching Yi Wen to the Seychelles so the three crewmembers who were injured in the clash could receive medical treatment, ministry spokesman James Chang (章計平) said. The boat’s owner decided to have the Kaohsiung-registered fishing boat resume operations a few hundred kilometers away from where it was hijacked, Chang said. The ministry reminded Taiwanese fishing boats to stay away from waters where hijackings have taken place.
COLLABORATION: As TSMC is building an advanced wafer fab in Dresden, Germany, it needs to build a comprehensive supply chain in Europe, Joseph Wu said Taiwan is planning to team up with the Czech Republic to build a semiconductor cluster in the European country, National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) said on Friday. Wu, who led a Taiwanese delegation at the annual GLOBSEC Forum held in Prague from Friday to today, said in a news conference that Taiwan seeks to foster cooperation between Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) and its counterparts in Czechia. Such cooperation is expected to transform the country into one of the most important semiconductor clusters in Europe over the next three to five years, he added. As TSMC is building an advanced
A joint declaration by Pacific leaders was reissued yesterday morning with mentions of Taiwan removed after China slammed an earlier version as a “mistake” that “must be corrected.” After five days of talks in Tonga, a “cleared” communique was released on Friday that reaffirmed a 30-year-old agreement allowing Taiwan to take part in the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF). However, the wording immediately raised the ire of Chinese diplomats, who piled pressure on Pacific leaders to amend the document. The forum reissued the communique without explanation yesterday morning, conspicuously deleting the paragraph concerning the bloc’s “relations with Taiwan.” “It must be a
A tropical depression in waters east of the Philippines could develop into a tropical storm as soon as today and bring rainfall as it approaches, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday, while issuing heat warnings for 14 cities and counties. Weather model simulations show that there are still considerable differences in the path that the tropical depression is projected to take. It might pass through the Bashi Channel to the South China Sea or turn northeast and move toward the sea south of Japan, CWA forecaster Yeh Chih-chun (葉致均) said, adding that the uncertainty of its movement is still high,
TAIWANESE INNOVATION: The ‘Seawool’ fabric generates about NT$200m a year, with the bulk of it sourced by clothing brands operating in Europe and the US Growing up on Taiwan’s west coast where mollusk farming is popular, Eddie Wang saw discarded oyster shells transformed from waste to function — a memory that inspired him to create a unique and environmentally friendly fabric called “Seawool.” Wang remembered that residents of his seaside hometown of Yunlin County used discarded oyster shells that littered the streets during the harvest as insulation for their homes. “They burned the shells and painted the residue on the walls. The houses then became warm in the winter and cool in the summer,” the 42-year-old said at his factory in Tainan. “So I was
RSS