People could soon be able to purchase airplane and boat tickets at chain convenience stores nationwide after lawmakers yesterday gave preliminary approval to an amendment to the Act for the Development of Tourism (發展觀光條例).
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chen Ken-te (陳根德), who presided over a meeting of the Transportation Committee, said the amendment needed no further negotiation between the two main political parties.
“We hope the bill can be passed quickly this legislative session,” Chen said, adding that if passed, the measure could be implemented within a month.
UNI AIR
The amendment was proposed by KMT Legislator Tsao Erh-chang (曹爾忠) and 21 other lawmakers after Uni Air’s announcement in September last year that people could purchase the plane tickets at convenience stores triggered a controversy in the travel industry.
The Travel Agent Association of ROC, Taiwan, protested the airline’s move, saying the law did not allow convenience stores to sell plane tickets.
Article 27 of the Act stipulates that businesses other than travel agencies may not undertake the operations of a travel agency.
However, the resale of land transportation tickets necessary for daily traffic needs is not subject to the act’s restrictions.
EXPANDING SERVICES
Tsao’s amendment would expand the scope of ticket sales from land transportation to include air and sea transportation, thereby adding to the quickly growing number of services that can be purchased at convenience stores nationwide.
In February last year, Family Mart announced that tickets for the high-speed rail could be bought at its outlets nationwide, either by using the ticket kiosks in the stores or by making reservations online and paying them at the store.
Additional reporting by staff writer
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching