TOURISM
S Korea tourism robust
The recent turmoil on the Korean Peninsula has had limited impact on South Korea’s tourism, a South Korean official said yesterday. The country has received about 32,000 tourists a day since tensions escalated between the two Koreas earlier this month, a jump of 5 percent compared with the same period a year ago, the Korea Tourism Organizations aid. Shim Jeong-bo, the organization’s executive vice president for marketing, added that South Korea would launch several worldwide promotional campaigns later this year, with Taiwan expected to play an important role in boosting tourism. Many of the campaigns, including lucky draws for cash prizes, will be offered for passengers taking direct flight services between Taipei International Airport (Songshan airport) and Seoul’s Gimpo Airport, which Shim said has generated a large influx of Taiwanese tourists. According to the organization, about 130,000 Taiwanese visited South Korea in the first quarter of the year, up 7.7 percent compared with a year ago.
DIPLOMACY
Doctors cancel Lee trip
Former president Lee Teng-hui’s (李登輝) office said yesterday in a press release that his planned trip to Japan this month has been canceled after a regular medical check-up. The office quoted Lee’s medical team as saying that while the 90-year-old was in fairly good health, they recommended that Lee, who has been hospitalized twice this year, avoid taking long trips. Lee was scheduled to deliver speeches in Tokyo and Zama City in Kanagawa Prefecture. The office said a Japan visit in the future would still be possible if Lee’s health permitted. Lee last visited Japan in September 2009.
POLITICS
Cross-strait trade talks done
Taiwan and China have concluded negotiations on a cross-strait agreement on trade in services and will soon sign a pact, Deputy Minister of Economic Affairs Cho Shih-chao (卓士昭) said yesterday. Under the terms of the agreement, Taiwan would be granted preferential treatment, Cho said at a forum on the government’s strategies to help Taiwanese businesses expand into global markets. Regarding Taiwanese investment in foreign countries, Cho said that Taiwanese businesspeople have changed their strategies and investment targets in light of the global economic stagnation and changes in China’s business environment. For instance, Taiwanese investors have shifted their focus from Southeast Asia to China, he said. They would opt to venture into other countries only after they have established footholds in China and Southeast Asia, he added.
SOCIETY
NIA polls foreign spouses
More than two-thirds of foreigners married to Taiwanese are from China and more than 10 percent of the country’s elementary-school students are now from families with one foreign parent, the National Immigration Agency (NIA) said. An agency report submitted to the legislature showed that there were 475,160 foreign spouses as of the end of February, 92.9 percent of whom were female. The majority of foreign spouses are from China, Hong Kong and Macau, which account for 320,709, or 67.5 percent, of all foreign spouses, followed by Vietnam with 87,712, or 18.5 percent, the agency said. It also cited Ministry of Education figures showing that 11.78 percent of the 1.37 million elementary-school students have a foreign parent, as do 4.91 percent of the nation’s 844,884 junior-high school students.
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