China Airlines Co (華航) and EVA Airlines Corp (長榮航空) said yesterday that flights to Japan remained normal, after a Taiwanese physician returning from Japan was confirmed to be infected with SARS on Saturday.
"Nothing unusual with our flights to Japan as of today," said China Airlines spokesman Roger Han (
A physician from Mackay Memorial Hospital who traveled to Japan was confirmed as having SARS after returning to Taiwan.
The case, however, has not prompted booking cancelations by tour groups to Japan for EVA as of yesterday, said company spokesman Nieh Kuo-wei (聶國維).
Both Han and Nieh said they do not expect the occupancy rate on the route to drop any further, as the carriers already suffered from a fall-off in bookings since the outbreak of SARS last month.
Currently, average occupancy on the carriers' services to Japan stays around 30 to 40 percent for EVA and less than 50 percent for China Airlines, they said.
But fear of the spread of SARS to Japan has prompted the Okinawa Prefectural government to suggest temporary suspension of the Taipei-Okinawa flight by China Airlines, while some of Japan's hotels were reportedly refusing lodging to people coming from Taiwan, China or Hong Kong.
China Airlines' Han said they have no plan to cancel daily flights on the route to Okinawa, which still enjoys a 60-percent occupancy rate. "But we will make our utmost effort to prevent passengers from contracting the virus while flying."
The Miyako Hotel in Osaka yesterday barred guests from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, according to a media report citing spokesman Tomoyuki Honiden.
The case has triggered further concerns for local travel agencies.
"In the past more than 70,000 tourists visited Japan per month," said Roget Hsu (許高慶), secretary-general of the Travel Agent Association (中華民國旅行公會). "But the figure declined to about 7,000 last month and, with the case, may fall further in the coming months."
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained