TRADE
Austria ratifies tax pact
Trade and investment between Taiwan and Austria is expected to get a boost when the double taxation avoidance agreement signed earlier this year takes effect next year, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday. The agreement, signed in July, was passed by the Austrian parliament on Wednesday, Department of European Affairs Director-General Zhang Ming-zhong (張銘忠) said. Taiwan has completed all legal procedures required for the agreement to come into effect, he said. After Austria finishes its final legal procedures, “the agreement is set to take effect Jan. 1, 2015,” he said at a regular news conference. This is Taiwan’s 13th tax agreement with a European country and 28th overall, the ministry said. Bilateral trade between Taiwan and Austria was US$780 million last year, while trade during the first three quarters of this year was more than US$630 million. The ministry said the agreement is expected to advance trade and investment relations and promote technical exchanges and business opportunities and will help strengthen Taiwan’s ties with the EU.
POLITICS
Premier urges paradigm shift
Premier Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國) yesterday urged Cabinet members to adjust their way of thinking and to fundamentally change their attitudes and ways of doing things. For example, government officials should avoid using the phrase “going down to the countryside,” to describe their visits to the electorate, as this implies that members of the public they meet are below the level of the officials, Mao said during the first official Cabinet meeting since he took office as premier last week. Cabinet members should interact humbly with residents in all parts of the nation, he said. Furthermore, the term “promulgate” should not be use to describe the Cabinet’s efforts to put across government’s policies to the public because it suggests one-way communication, Mao said. He also advised government officials to avoid seeking excuses for their failures and instead try to find ways to achieve success.
TOURISM
Taiwanese No.1 in Japan
More than 2.61 million Taiwanese visited Japan during the first 11 months of the year, topping the list of foreign tourist arrivals to the nation, according to statistics released by the Japanese Tourism Agency on Wednesday. South Koreans ranked second on the list, with 2.48 million arrivals, followed by China with 2.21 million and Hong Kong with 819,000, the figures showed. A total 12.17 million foreign nationals visited Japan from January-to-November, an increase of 28.2 percent year-on-year, the data show. The number is expected to top 13 million by the end of the year, exceeding the 10 million visitors to Japan last year. The agency said the falling Japanese yen was one of the reasons for the increase in visitor arrivals.
TOURISM
MOFA issues visa reminder
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday reminded travelers to Europe’s Schengen Area of changes to short-stay visa requirements being implemented over the next several months. The requirements include collecting the fingerprints from all 10 digits of each visa applicant as part of the Visa Information System, which was launched in 2011 to ask Schengen member states’ overseas missions to begin gradually rolling out the new system over a period of three years.
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