The losses sustained by hundreds of Taiwan-invested firms during recent anti-China protest in Vietnam is estimated at between US$1.5 billion and US$5 billion, the Executive Yuan was told yesterday.
Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Shen Jong-chin (沈榮津) yesterday briefed a task force led by Vice Premier Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國) about a fact-finding trip he undertook to Vietnam last week.
The trip was to assess the damages caused to properties owned by Taiwanese investors when Vietnamese staged protests on May 13 and 14 against China because of its deployment of an oil rig near the disputed Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島) in the South China Sea.
The latest statistics provided by Shen was that 358 Taiwan-operated factories were attacked by Vietnamese during the protests and 21 firms were set on fire.
During their visit in Vietnam, Shen visited several Taiwanese chambers of commerce and sat down with Vietnamese officials to raise compensation issues, including with Vietnamese Planning and Investment Minister Bui Quang Vinh.
Meanwhile, Minister of Foreign Affairs David Lin (林永樂) reiterated the demands that Taiwan has made to Vietnam over the attack against Taiwanese facilities at a meeting with Vietnamese Minister of Industry and Trade Vu Huy Hoang on Monday, the ministry’s spokesperson, Anna Kao (高安), said yesterday.
Lin urged the Vietnamese government to come up with concrete measures to ensure the safety of Taiwanese businessmen and expatriates in the country, compensate Taiwanese businessmen for their losses and restore Taiwanese businessmen’s confidence in investing in Vietnam, Kao said.
Separately, the second delegation of psychologists and psychiatrists organized by the Ministry of Health and Welfare departed for Vietnam yesterday to provide counseling and psychotherapy to help Taiwanese businesspeople and expatriates recover from possible trauma, Executive Yuan spokesperson Sun Lih-chyun (孫立群) said yesterday.
Fast food chain McDonald's is to raise prices by up to NT$5 on some products at its restaurants across Taiwan, starting on Wednesday next week, the company announced today. The prices of all extra value meals and sharing boxes are to increase by NT$5, while breakfast combos and creamy corn soup would go up by NT$3, the company said in a statement. The price of the main items of those meals, if ordered individually, would remain the same. Meanwhile, the price of a medium-sized lemon iced tea and hot cappuccino would rise by NT$3, extra dipping sauces for chicken nuggets would go up
Yangmingshan National Park’s Qingtiangang (擎天崗) nature area has gone viral after a park livestream camera observed a couple in the throes of intimate congress, which was broadcast live on YouTube, drawing large late-night crowds and sparking a backlash over noise, bright lights and disruption to wildlife habitat. The area’s livestream footage appeared to show a couple engaging in sexual activity on a picnic table in the park on Friday last week, with the uncensored footage streamed publicly online. The footage quickly spread across social media, prompting a tide of visitors to travel to the site to “check in” and recreate the
GROUNDED: A KMT lawmaker proposed eliminating drone development programs and freezing funding for counterdrone systems, despite China’s adoption of the technology China has deployed attack drones at air bases near the Taiwan Strait in a strategy aimed at overwhelming Taiwan’s air defense systems through saturation attacks, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said. The council’s latest quarterly report on China said that satellite imagery and open-source intelligence indicate that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had converted retired J-6 fighter jets into J-6W drones, which the PLA has stationed at six air bases near Taiwan, five in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province. The report cited J. Michael Dahm, a senior fellow at the US-based Mitchell Institute, as saying that China has
Carrefour Taiwan is to begin using a new name from the start of July, but it cannot divulge the name until then, the chairman of the supermarket chain's parent company said today. President Chain Store Co chairman Lo Chih-hsien (羅智先) was asked by reporters after a shareholders' meeting to confirm whether the company has settled on a new name for the supermarket brand. In March, the government-registered name of two Carrefour Taiwan branches was quietly changed to "Le Chia Kang" (樂家康) in Chinese, raising speculation that has been selected as the name. Lo said that because of local regulations and contractual obligations, the