DIPLOMACY
Japan’s Mori plants cherries
Former Japanese prime minister Yoshiro Mori, who arrived in Taiwan on Thursday, will attend a cherry blossom planting today in recognition of the strong ties between the two countries. More than 500 people, half of whom are Japanese, plan to join Mori in planting seeds at the Yoichi Hatta Memorial Park in Greater Tainan, said the event’s organizer, a sports association from Japan. Mori said the memorial park was built in May last year in honor of Hatta, a Japanese engineer who made major contributions to Taiwan’s hydraulic development in the early 1900s by building the Chianan Canal (嘉南大圳) and the Wushantou Reservoir (烏山頭水庫). More than a century after Hatta’s work, Taiwanese returned the favor by donating generously in the wake of last year’s March 11 earthquake and tsunami, Mori said. “On behalf of Japanese, I want to express my thanks to Taiwan,” Mori said.
GOVERNMENT
Ma’s nominees confirmed
President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) nominees for vice president of the Examination Yuan Wu Jin-lin (伍錦霖) and for membership of the civil service testing branch Nancy Chao (趙麗雲) and Hwang Giin-tarng (黃錦堂) passed their confirmation yesterday, each by a vote of 66 to 6. The Democratic Progressive Party, which holds 40 seats in the 113-seat legislature, declined to cast ballots because the vote “was merely a formality.” The Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) and the People First Party (PFP), each of which has three seats, said they all voted against the nominations. The TSU said that the party opposed the nominees because they did not support shrinking the council of the Examination Yuan, which currently has 19 members, while the PFP said it was not satisfied with their academic qualifications.
TOURISM
FIT to expand this month
Taiwan has decided to expand its Free Independent Traveler (FIT) program for Chinese nationals with effect from late this month, to allow visits by individual tourists from other Chinese cities besides Beijing, Shanghai and Xiamen, the National Immigration Agency said yesterday. Starting on April 28, Chinese tourists from Tianjin, Chongqing, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Hangzhou and Chengdu will be allowed to make independent trips to Taiwan, which means they will no longer be required to join a tour group, the agency said. As part of Taiwan’s broader efforts to increase tourism from China, the daily quota of independent Chinese visitors will also be doubled to 1,000 with effect from April 28, the immigration agency said.
ROAD SAFETY
Ministry mulls Yeoh invite
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications said it might invite Hollywood actress Michelle Yeoh (楊紫瓊) to help raise awareness of road safety. The proposal came following the visit of Yeoh’s fiance, former Ferrari CEO Jean Todt, to the Ministry of Transportation and Communications on Thursday. Hsieh Chao-i (謝潮儀), executive secretary of the Road Traffic Safety Committee, met Todt on behalf of the ministry. He said Todt came as the president of motorsport’s governing body, the FIA, which now helps promote the UN’s 10-year campaign to enhance global road safety. The UN had announced a “Decade of Action for Road Safety,” beginning last year, which aimed to save 5 million lives by 2020. Yeoh also serves as the global ambassador for the “Make Roads Safe” campaign, launched by the Commission for Global Road Safety under the FIA.
ENVIRONMENT
Endangered bird tracked
An endangered black-faced spoonbill was released into the wild at a wetlands in Greater Tainan yesterday after being fitted with a satellite transmitter to track its migration route for wildlife conservation purposes. “It is the first time that we fitted a black-faced spoonbill with that type of advanced equipment for migration tracking,” said Leu Teng-yuan (呂登元), director of the Taijiang National Park Administration in Greater Tainan. The two-year-old bird, dubbed T46, was caught late on Thursday at the city’s Sihcao Wildlife Conservation Area, which is one of the nation’s largest wetlands and forms part of the national park, Lu said. Earlier this year, three black-faced spoonbills were fitted with radio transmitters to track their movements in Taiwan, Lu said. Saying black-faced spoonbills have begun flying back to their breeding grounds in the north, Lu said the satellite transmitter would facilitate mapping of T46’s migratory paths.
TOURISM
Resorts seeking volunteers
Foreign students are being invited to join a volunteer program at mountain resorts this summer as part of an effort to promote tourism among young adults, the organizers said yesterday. The Council of Agriculture, in collaboration with the world’s largest student-run organization, AIESEC, is aiming to recruit 16 foreign and 32 local volunteers to work at mountain resorts during the peak tourist months of July and August. They will serve as tour guides and activity organizers, and will help with environmental protection and maintenance, said Weng Li-hsin (翁麗芯), a section chief at the Forestry Bureau’s recreation division. The volunteers will be asked to write blogs about their experience so that more people can learn about Taiwan’s beauty, she said. More information can be found at: www.recreation.forest.gov.tw.
SOCIETY
Marriages rise 1.3 percent
The number of local marriages increased by 1.3 percent in the first quarter of this year from the same period last year, edging up to 39,448, the latest government statistics showed. Of that number, 5,407 were “cross-cultural” marriages, which represented 13.7 percent of the total and a 1.6 percent annual increase in that category, the data showed. On average, one out of every 7.3 marriages in the first quarter was cross--cultural, the Directorate-General of Budget Accounting and Statistics report said. In the majority of such marriages, the spouses of Taiwanese were from China (63.3 percent), followed by Southeast Asian countries (22.4 percent). The number of divorces declined 0.9 percent year-on-year in the first quarter to 13,047. About 24.8 percent of divorces were among cross-cultural couples.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the