SPORTS
Ko signs for Gay Games bid
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) on Friday signed an official letter backing the Taiwan Gay Sports and Taiwan Gay Development Movement Association’s application for Taipei to host the 2026 Gay Games. The administration said that the event could potentially attract 15,000 athletes to the city. The quadrennial event is the largest sports competition for the international LGBT community. In 2018, Taiwan won 10 gold, five silver and three bronze medals at the games in Paris. Taiwan is competing with more than 20 cities from 14 nations for hosting rights. The Sports Administration said it is working with the association to host the Straits Games in October next year.
POLITICS
Ministers remain in shuffle
Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) and Minister of National Defense Yen De-fa (嚴德發) are to remain in their posts when President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) second-term Cabinet takes office on Wednesday, sources said yesterday. Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chen Ming-tong (陳明通), Veterans Affairs Council Minister Feng Shih-kuan (馮世寬) and Ocean Affairs Council Minister Lee Chung-wei (李仲威) are to stay in their current roles, they said. The government is carrying out a Cabinet reshuffle ahead of Tsai’s re-inauguration next week. The sources said that Representative to Thailand Tung Chen-yuan (童振源) would replace Wu Hsin-hsing (吳新興) as overseas community affairs council minister.
SOCIETY
Miaoli doctor recognized
Hsieh Chun-mei (謝春梅), a physician who served his Miaoli community for more than seven decades until his death at the age of 99 last month, was on Friday posthumously awarded a presidential citation. President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) presented the citation to Hsieh’s family at his funeral in Miaoli County’s Gongguan Township (公館). Thanking him for his lifelong service to his hometown and society, Tsai asked the Hakka Affairs Council to ensure that his story is recorded so that it can be told for generations to come. Hsieh, who was the oldest certified medical practitioner in Taiwan, passed away on April 29. Born into a poor farming family, he received his medical license in 1944 during the Japanese colonial rule. Instead of moving to Taipei, he chose to remain in Gongguan as his father had asked him to stay because there were no doctors in his village. He saw patients nearly every day, and even provided healthcare to people who could not afford treatment, his family said.
LABOR
Taiwan tops complaints
Nearly one-third of complaints filed by Indonesian migrant fishers are employed on Taiwanese ships, the most of any nation, according to statistics released by the Indonesian National Board for the Placement and Protection of Indonesian Overseas Workers. Of the 389 complaints it received from 2018 to Wednesday last week, 120 were filed by fishers working on Taiwanese ships, agency head Benny Rhamdani said. Fishers working on South Korean ships reported the second-highest number of complaints, with 42, followed by Peru (30), China (23) and South Africa (16). The agency said that 164 of the complaints involved unpaid wages, while 47 involved deaths, 46 dealt with injuries, 23 with forced deportations and 18 fishers reported that their passports or other documents had been confiscated by brokers. While 213 of the complaints have been resolved, the rest are still being processed, it added.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift