TRANSPORTATION
Tolls suspended for holidays
The National Freeway Bureau announced that it would suspend freeway tolls at night for the Tomb Sweeping Festival holiday weekend. From April 2 to April 5, freeways will be toll-free between the hours of midnight and 7am to provide an incentive for travelers to drive during off-peak hours. The bureau said it was still considering other freeway control policies in its comprehensive traffic plan for the holiday weekend, but said that volume should be less than what was experienced between the Feb. 26 to Feb. 28 three-day weekend. The bureau attributed the severe traffic jams between Feb. 26 and Feb. 28 to the Taiwan Lantern Festival in Miaoli County. According to the bureau, freeway traffic volume for each day of the three-day Tomb Sweeping weekend last year reached 2.27 million, 2.3 million and 2.25 million respectively.
CULTURE
Taipei choir touring US
The Taipei Philharmonic Chamber Choir will perform in Boston, New York and Chicago from today until next Friday, a choir spokesman said yesterday. The spokesman also said that first lady Chow Mei-ching (周美青) has been invited to serve as the group’s honorary leader during the tour. The group has been invited by the American Choral Directors Association to perform in this year’s Biennial National Conference in Chicago, he said. The choir will kick off the tour with a performance at John Knowles Paine Concert Hall at Harvard University today, before taking the stage at New York’s Carnegie Hall on Sunday. It will give two recitals at Roosevelt University and the Chicago Symphony Hall on Wednesday and will round off its trip with a performance at Metea Valley High School, also in Chicago, next Friday.
E-COMMERCE
Snacks popular in China
Taiwan’s pineapple cakes, “iron eggs” and brown-sugar lollipops are listed as the three best-selling snacks on a leading shopping Web site in China, a local e-commerce company said yesterday. “The e-commerce environment is becoming more and more convenient, and online stock trading has become very common between China and Taiwan,” according to e-Dynamics, a Taiwanese company that cooperates with Taobao, a top Chinese shopping site, to sell Taiwanese products. “Taiwanese products are appealing to Chinese buyers,” the company said. “As long as the prices are reasonable, shoppers are usually willing to try new products.”
AGRICULTURE
Overseas crops planned
Taiwan is planning to follow in the footsteps of other countries by growing crops overseas to meet domestic demand amid soaring prices of raw materials, the agriculture agency said yesterday. The Council of Agriculture (COA) said it is considering countries in the region with which it could cooperate, citing Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam as possible candidates for growing crops such as corn, rice, soy beans and wheat. The overseas production plan, which will be implemented in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is likely to be finalized within two months, according to the COA. Taiwan will also learn from the experiences of China, Japan and South Korea in growing crops overseas, it added. On the possible forms of cooperation, the COA said, the government could encourage Taiwanese companies to engage in overseas crop production by offering subsidies or asking state-run companies to work with private companies to produce the crops.
SOCIETY
Counseling available
Medication is not the only way to cure depression that is affecting a marriage, a health worker said yesterday ahead of International Women’s Day on Tuesday. A social worker surnamed Tung (董) at the psychiatric department of Taipei City Hospital’s Songde branch urged the public to make full use of government-reimbursed marriage and family counseling services. Learning how to cope with pressure and improve relationships between family members are also part of an effective treatment regimen for depression, Tung said. Therapeutic counseling, as opposed to prescription drugs, can help sufferers understand more about their own condition and help them find the root of the condition, she said. “Not many people know that counseling services are available under the national health insurance program. We want to send out the message that there are alternatives to drugs when it comes to battling depression,” she said.
SOCIETY
Bureau to host families
In celebration of the Children’s Day on April 4, the Ministry of the Interior’s Child Welfare Bureau will treat 100 families with at least three children — at least two of which must be under the age of 12 — to a free tour of the Taipei International Flora Expo on April 2, with not only the admission, but also transportation and lunch covered by the bureau, the bureau’s director-general Chang Hsiu-yuan (張秀鴛) announced at a press conference yesterday. She said that as the nation’s birthrate continues to drop, the event is part of the ministry’s plan to encourage people to have more children. Those who would like to sign up for the event should submit a 300-character essay on raising children and family values, Chang said, For details, visit www.cbi.gov.tw.
COLLABORATION: As TSMC is building an advanced wafer fab in Dresden, Germany, it needs to build a comprehensive supply chain in Europe, Joseph Wu said Taiwan is planning to team up with the Czech Republic to build a semiconductor cluster in the European country, National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) said on Friday. Wu, who led a Taiwanese delegation at the annual GLOBSEC Forum held in Prague from Friday to today, said in a news conference that Taiwan seeks to foster cooperation between Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) and its counterparts in Czechia. Such cooperation is expected to transform the country into one of the most important semiconductor clusters in Europe over the next three to five years, he added. As TSMC is building an advanced
A joint declaration by Pacific leaders was reissued yesterday morning with mentions of Taiwan removed after China slammed an earlier version as a “mistake” that “must be corrected.” After five days of talks in Tonga, a “cleared” communique was released on Friday that reaffirmed a 30-year-old agreement allowing Taiwan to take part in the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF). However, the wording immediately raised the ire of Chinese diplomats, who piled pressure on Pacific leaders to amend the document. The forum reissued the communique without explanation yesterday morning, conspicuously deleting the paragraph concerning the bloc’s “relations with Taiwan.” “It must be a
A tropical depression in waters east of the Philippines could develop into a tropical storm as soon as today and bring rainfall as it approaches, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday, while issuing heat warnings for 14 cities and counties. Weather model simulations show that there are still considerable differences in the path that the tropical depression is projected to take. It might pass through the Bashi Channel to the South China Sea or turn northeast and move toward the sea south of Japan, CWA forecaster Yeh Chih-chun (葉致均) said, adding that the uncertainty of its movement is still high,
TAIWANESE INNOVATION: The ‘Seawool’ fabric generates about NT$200m a year, with the bulk of it sourced by clothing brands operating in Europe and the US Growing up on Taiwan’s west coast where mollusk farming is popular, Eddie Wang saw discarded oyster shells transformed from waste to function — a memory that inspired him to create a unique and environmentally friendly fabric called “Seawool.” Wang remembered that residents of his seaside hometown of Yunlin County used discarded oyster shells that littered the streets during the harvest as insulation for their homes. “They burned the shells and painted the residue on the walls. The houses then became warm in the winter and cool in the summer,” the 42-year-old said at his factory in Tainan. “So I was
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