TRAVEL
Taichung-Okinawa flight
Starlux Airlines, Taiwan’s newest international carrier, is to launch direct flights between Taichung and Okinawa, Japan, starting today, the Taichung City Government announced yesterday. The route would utilize an Airbus A321neo aircraft with 188 seats, creating new international tourism opportunities for Taichung, while serving 7.3 million central Taiwan residents and travelers from Japan, the city government said in a news release. Starlux said it would operate four round-trip flights weekly on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Flights to Okinawa would depart from Taichung at 12:30pm and arrive at Naha Airport at 3pm local time, while return flights would leave at 4pm local time and land in Taichung at 4:50pm, the airline said.
TOURISM
Taipei 76th in top 100 list
CNN Travel on Saturday reported on a list compiled by global marketing experts ranking the top 100 cities in the world for next year, which includes Taipei. The piece introduced next year’s World’s Best Cities report, created by international marketing consultancy Resonance in collaboration with global market research company Ipsos. The report was compiled using statistics from a survey of 22,000 respondents in 30 countries combined with data ranking cities based on the indicators of livability, lovability and prosperity. In the report, Taipei placed 76th after receiving a score of 51 for lovability and 56 for livability. “From urban jungle to real-life nature, Taipei serves up a balanced landscape of future-defining tech manufacturing and its coveted good life,” the report said. The report introduced Taiwan’s capital as a foodie heaven that ranked 22nd in the list’s food category.
SOCIETY
Woman dies in Daan blaze
A 53-year-old woman died from a fire in a 17-story public housing building in Taipei’s Daan District (大安) in the early hours of yesterday morning. Seventeen fire trucks, four command vehicles and four ambulances were dispatched to Fuxing S Road after authorities received a report of the blaze at 4:14am. First responders extracted a mother and son from the 16th-floor unit, where the fire started. The mother, a 53-year-old, identified by her surname, Chueh (闕), was taken to nearby Cathay General Hospital, where she was pronounced dead after efforts to restart her heart failed. Her 19-year-old son was found conscious and is receiving treatment. Forty-five residents were also evacuated from the fire with the assistance of more than 60 police and firefighting personnel. The fire was extinguished by 4:49am. The cause of the blaze is still under investigation.
SCIENCE
Inventors win 108 medals
A delegation of inventors from Taiwan won a total of 108 medals at the annual Seoul International Invention Fair, which ran from Wednesday to Saturday. Led by the Taiwan Invention Association, the 220-strong Taiwanese delegation took 41 gold, 42 silver and 25 bronze medals at the event in South Korea. Taiwan’s inventors secured their record-breaking achievement in competition with over 500 entries from 32 countries. Taiwan submitted 112 inventions this year. A younger team from Keelung’s Mingchuan Junior High School won four golds, four silvers and a bronze for a wide range of ideas, including a smart medicine container that reminds owners to take their pills.
A strong continental cold air mass and abundant moisture bringing snow to mountains 3,000m and higher over the past few days are a reminder that more than 60 years ago Taiwan had an outdoor ski resort that gradually disappeared in part due to climate change. On Oct. 24, 2021, the National Development Council posted a series of photographs on Facebook recounting the days when Taiwan had a ski resort on Hehuanshan (合歡山) in Nantou County. More than 60 years ago, when developing a branch of the Central Cross-Island Highway, the government discovered that Hehuanshan, with an elevation of more than 3,100m,
SECURITY: To protect the nation’s Internet cables, the navy should use buoys marking waters within 50m of them as a restricted zone, a former navy squadron commander said A Chinese cargo ship repeatedly intruded into Taiwan’s contiguous and sovereign waters for three months before allegedly damaging an undersea Internet cable off Kaohsiung, a Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) investigation revealed. Using publicly available information, the Liberty Times was able to reconstruct the Shunxing-39’s movements near Taiwan since Double Ten National Day last year. Taiwanese officials did not respond to the freighter’s intrusions until Friday last week, when the ship, registered in Cameroon and Tanzania, turned off its automatic identification system shortly before damage was inflicted to a key cable linking Taiwan to the rest of
Death row inmate Huang Lin-kai (黃麟凱), who was convicted for the double murder of his former girlfriend and her mother, is to be executed at the Taipei Detention Center tonight, the Ministry of Justice announced. Huang, who was a military conscript at the time, was convicted for the rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend, surnamed Wang (王), and the murder of her mother, after breaking into their home on Oct. 1, 2013. Prosecutors cited anger over the breakup and a dispute about money as the motives behind the double homicide. This is the first time that Minister of Justice Cheng Ming-chien (鄭銘謙) has
TRANSPORT CONVENIENCE: The new ticket gates would accept a variety of mobile payment methods, and buses would be installed with QR code readers for ease of use New ticketing gates for the Taipei metro system are expected to begin service in October, allowing users to swipe with cellphones and select credit cards partnered with Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC), the company said on Tuesday. TRTC said its gates in use are experiencing difficulty due to their age, as they were first installed in 2007. Maintenance is increasingly expensive and challenging as the manufacturing of components is halted or becoming harder to find, the company said. Currently, the gates only accept EasyCard, iPass and electronic icash tickets, or one-time-use tickets purchased at kiosks, the company said. Since 2023, the company said it
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