Jengjong Spareribs (正忠排骨飯) restaurant chain yesterday apologized to frontline medical professionals and pledged to donate NT$1 million (US$32,971) to the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) after one of its outlets in Taichung was criticized for refusing to deliver to a local hospital.
A Taichung Veterans General Hospital nurse posted on Facebook that a delivery order to the hospital had been turned down by the restaurant’s Fuko branch, adding: “For the first time, I felt my profession was discriminated against.”
The company wanted to apologize to the nation’s medical professional working on the front line, Jengjong Spareribs brand manager Wang Jui-hsiang (王睿翔) said, adding that the branch’s decision had not been authorized by the company’s headquarters.
Photo: Chang Ching-ya, Taipei Times
Several of the chain’s outlets are located in hospital food courts and are operating normally, and its headquarters has never told any branch to suspend delivery services to hospitals amid COVID-19 concerns, Wang said in the statement.
The director of the Fuko branch has been demoted for misconduct, the statement said.
“During the disease-prevention period, Jengjong Spareribs vows to prioritize orders coming from medical staff or hospitals,” it said.
Taichung Veterans General Hospital has also offered its thanks to people who have showed support and encouragement to the medical staff during this time.
Four other Taichung hospitals yesterday said they have not encountered a similar problem.
No staff hve had a food delivery canceled, Kuang Tien General Hospital said.
Tung’s Taichung Metroharbor Hospital said some of its patients had prepared masks for doctors as a show of goodwill.
Feng Yuan Hospital said it received 24 bowls of seafood porridge from a nearby restaurant, and 50 hamburgers from another, for free, adding that food operators in the neighborhood are all kind-hearted.
Taichung Tzu Chi Hospital said that deliveries of food orders have been proceeding normally, although it now requires that all deliveries be dropped off at a single location, instead of being sent to the departments or offices that placed the order.
Additional reporting by Ou Su-mei
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS