CHARITY
Happy Run held in Jakarta
The Taiwan Excellence Happy Run, a charity event that features food and beverages, as well as games and performances, was yesterday held in Jakarta, Indonesia, for the fourth straight year. The annual run attracted nearly 3,500 runners to 5km and 10km events that began in the city’s Gelora Bung Karno Stadium. Participants were encouraged to donate books to charity. The books would be donated to a local charity organization, the Obor Berkat Indonesi, to be distributed to children from underprivileged backgrounds, the event’s organizers said.
TOURISM
Visa-free entry postponed
A plan to grant visa-free entry to visitors from the Philippines as of June 1 has been postponed, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Friday. The ministry said the plan’s implementation has been pushed back indefinitely to complete administrative procedures and negotiations. “The exact date for the measure will be announced in September,” it said, adding that e-visa privileges remain in place for Philippine visitors. An inter-agency meeting last month decided to expand visa privileges to visitors from Thailand, Brunei and the Philippines and streamline the visa application process for visitors from other Southeast Asian and South Asian nations. The plan is part of the government’s efforts to promote exchanges with the Philippines under its “new southbound policy.”
TRANSPORTATION
Train enters wrong way
Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp on Saturday said that human negligence was responsible for an incident that led to a high-speed train traveling in the wrong direction. The incident, which occurred on Wednesday, was the first of its kind since the inauguration of the high-speed train in 2007. Local media reported that an empty passenger train entered Zuoying Station at 3pm after tests and was supposed to travel to Yanchao Main Workshop in Kaohsiung, but the track controller at Tainan Station failed switch tracks, sending the train in the wrong direction. The train headed north to Tainan and stopped after traveling 1km past the railroad switch. It was rerouted to Tainan after about one minute and entered the workshop. The company said the incident did not affect operational safety. All high-speed trains are protected by an automatic train control system to ensure they brake automatically at a set distance from any train in front of them, eliminating the possibility of a collision.
CRIME
Taiwanese held in Thailand
Two Taiwanese have been arrested in Thailand over alleged connections with a telecoms fraud ring targeting people in China, police said on Friday. The suspects, surnamed Cheng (鄭) and surnamed Chou (周), are expected to be deported to Taiwan, police added. Six Chinese and a Thai were also arrested in a raid conducted jointly by Taiwanese and Thai police in Bangkok on Tuesday, according to the Criminal Investigation Bureau. A probe had found that the ring, allegedly led by a Taiwanese surnamed Liang (梁), had bases in various Southeast Asian nations and launched its operations in Thailand in March, the bureau said. The operations in Thailand were allegedly run by Cheng and Chou, who hired Chinese and Thai nationals to pose as police officers and prosecutors to defraud people, the bureau said. The ring made illicit gains of more than 1 million yuan (US$144,925), it said. Liang was arrested in Taiwan on Wednesday, it added.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
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