HOLIDAYS
Officials confirm 115 days
The number of holidays and weekends next year will total 115 days, including six long weekends lasting three days or longer, a calendar released yesterday by the Directorate-General of Personnel Administration showed. The six extended public holidays are the Lunar New Year holiday (Feb. 2 to Feb. 10) and the weekends following 228 Peace Memorial Day (Feb. 28 to March 3), Children’s Day and Tombsweeping Festival (April 4 to April 7), Dragon Boat Festival (June 7 to June 9), Mid-Autumn Festival (Sept. 13 to Sept. 15) and Double Ten National Day (Oct. 10 to Oct. 13), the calendar showed. Feb. 7 during the Lunar New Year holiday falls on a Thursday, so the following Friday would be included in the nine-day public holiday. The previous Saturday, Jan. 26, would normally be a makeup day, but as that coincides with the national General Scholastic Ability Test, the administration will use Jan. 19 as an official makeup day, an official said.
RAILWAYS
THSR to reach 500m riders
Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp (THSRC) expects to welcome its 500 millionth passenger near the end of this month, the company said yesterday, adding that a series of events would be held to celebrate the occasion. As of Sunday, about 496 million tickets had been sold since the high-speed rail started operations on Jan. 5, 2007, it said. To celebrate the milestone, THSRC said it would reward the 500 millionth passenger with a year of unlimited free rides. The two preceding passengers, as well as the following two would win high-speed rail vacation packages of their choice, including free hotels and business class round-trip train tickets, the company said. The railway transported an average of 173,000 passengers each day during the first six months of the year, up 5 percent from the same period last year, the company said.
EARTHQUAKES
Temblors strike together
Two earthquakes registering magnitude 4.6 and magnitude 4.5 struck simultaneously within several kilometers of each other off the coast of Chiayi at 3:26pm yesterday, the Central Weather Bureau said. The epicenter of the magnitude 4.6 earthquake was at sea about 19.8km east of Chiayi County Hall at a depth of 12.1km, while the other temblor was at sea about 20.2km east of the county hall at a depth of 8.9km, the bureau’s Seismology Center said. The intensity of the two earthquakes was highest in Chiayi City and Dapu Township (大埔) in Chiayi County, where they measured 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale. The temblors could be felt in other places in central and southern Taiwan, with the intensity ranging from 1 to 3.
CRIME
Suspected money mule held
A Malaysian national visiting Taiwan has been arrested on suspicion of working as money mules for a fraud ring, the Tainan City Police Department said on Saturday. Lin Yun-hao (林雲豪), head of the department’s fourth precinct, said that his team on Friday received a tipoff about a suspicious person withdrawing NT$105,800 from an ATM at a local convenience store. The suspect, surnamed Yen (顏), 25, was detained for questioning by police that day and confessed that he had been hired through a contact in Malaysia to smuggle money out of Taiwan, police said. Yen is a tour bus driver in Malaysia and wanted to make extra money on the side to supplement his unstable income, police quoted him as saying.
Thirty-five earthquakes have exceeded 5.5 on the Richter scale so far this year, the most in 14 years, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said on Facebook on Thursday. A large earthquake in Hualien County on April 3 released five times as much the energy as the 921 Earthquake on Sept. 21, 1999, the agency said in its latest earthquake report for this year. Hualien County has had the most national earthquake alerts so far this year at 64, with Yilan County second with 23 and Changhua County third with nine, the agency said. The April 3 earthquake was what caused the increase in
INTIMIDATION: In addition to the likely military drills near Taiwan, China has also been waging a disinformation campaign to sow division between Taiwan and the US Beijing is poised to encircle Taiwan proper in military exercise “Joint Sword-2024C,” starting today or tomorrow, as President William Lai (賴清德) returns from his visit to diplomatic allies in the Pacific, a national security official said yesterday. Commenting on condition of anonymity, the official said that multiple intelligence sources showed that China is “highly likely” to launch new drills around Taiwan. Although the drills’ scale is unknown, there is little doubt that they are part of the military activities China initiated before Lai’s departure, they said. Beijing at the same time is conducting information warfare by fanning skepticism of the US and
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is unlikely to attempt an invasion of Taiwan during US president-elect Donald Trump’s time in office, Taiwanese and foreign academics said on Friday. Trump is set to begin his second term early next year. Xi’s ambition to establish China as a “true world power” has intensified over the years, but he would not initiate an invasion of Taiwan “in the near future,” as his top priority is to maintain the regime and his power, not unification, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University distinguished visiting professor and contemporary Chinese politics expert Akio Takahara said. Takahara made the comment at a
DEFENSE: This month’s shipment of 38 modern M1A2T tanks would begin to replace the US-made M60A3 and indigenous CM11 tanks, whose designs date to the 1980s The M1A2T tanks that Taiwan expects to take delivery of later this month are to spark a “qualitative leap” in the operational capabilities of the nation’s armored forces, a retired general told the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) in an interview published yesterday. On Tuesday, the army in a statement said it anticipates receiving the first batch of 38 M1A2T Abrams main battle tanks from the US, out of 108 tanks ordered, in the coming weeks. The M1 Abrams main battle tank is a generation ahead of the Taiwanese army’s US-made M60A3 and indigenously developed CM11 tanks, which have
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