■ Cross-strait ties
Notorious gangster arrested
One of the country's most wanted criminals has been arrested in Guangdong Province the National Police Administration (NPA) confirmed yesterday. Police said that Wu Tung-tang (吳桐潭) was arrested in the city of Zhuhai earlier this month and that they then faxed information on Wu, including his fingerprints, to Guangdong police to verify his identity. The NPA said it will arrange for Wu to be repatriated via Kinmen. Wu and some collegues reportedly arrived in China from Thailand on March 14.
■ Diplomacy
`Go South' policy working
The government will conti-nue to promote its "go south" policy to encourage invest-ment in Southeast Asia and boost cooperative ties with countries in the region, Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Tou Chou-seng (杜筑生) said yesterday. Delivering a report on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs work agenda at a legislative committee meeting, Tou said Southeast Asia is one of the four target areas for intensified diplo-matic work, along with the US, Japan and the EU. Since the government adopted a "go south" policy to encour-age businesspeople to invest in Southeast Asia, Tou said, relations with Southeast Asian countries have been strengthened significantly. "The level of bilateral consultations with Singa-pore, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia have been upgraded, and the status of our representative offices in Thailand and Indonesia have also been enhanced," Tou said.
■ Cross-strait ties
Wang not going to Singapore
Taiwan Affairs spokesman Zhang Mingqing (張銘清) said yesterday that Wang Daohan (汪道涵) has no plans to visit Singapore next month. Zhang made the remark in a regular press conference yesterday in Beijing which is seen to have shut the door for a possible Koo-Wang meeting in April. On Tues-day, Straits Exchange Foun-dation Chairman Koo Chen-fu (辜振甫) expressed his willingness to meet Wang in a cross-strait relations symposium scheduled for next month in Singapore. Wang is the head of China's Association of Relations across the Taiwan Strait. April 26 will be the 10th anniversary of the first Koo-Wang meeting in Singapore in 1992.
■ Diplomacy
Visa-free tourism urged
Wu Wen-Ya (吳文雅), repre-sentative of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Malaysia said yesterday that if Kuala Lumpur were to match the visa-free treatment that Taiwan gives to Malaysians, Taiwanese would "travel in droves" to the Southeast Asian country. Wu noted that Malaysian tourist visits to Taiwan increased by 50 percent after Taipei granted 14-day visa-free entry to Malaysians. Wu said he believes that when the visa-free period is expanded to 30 days in May, the number of Malaysian tourists will increase dramatically. The number of Taiwan tourists to Malaysia totaled 209,700 last year, down from 250,000 visitors of the year before.
■ Society
People fear overwork
Many people worry about dying from overwork, according to the results of a survey released yesterday. The survey of 11,621 white-collar workers, conducted by the 104 Job Bank, found that 37.6 percent of ordinary workers said they are worried about dying from overwork. The ratio reached 48.9 percent among senior management executives and 66.7 percent among corpor-ate owners.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
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