AFTERMATH:A charter flight will arrive this afternoon with some relatives of the 24 Chinese tourists who died on Tuesday when their tour bus turned into an inferno

Taipei Times
Date: Jul 21, 2016
By: Shelley Shan / Staff reporter

Minister of Transportation and Communications Hochen Tan (賀陳旦) yesterday vowed to launch

reforms of the tour bus industry following Tuesday’s fire that killed 24 Chinese tourists and two Taiwanese — the bus driver and tour guide.

They died after their bus caught fire on National Freeway No. 2 en route to Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport. The group was headed home after an eight-day tour around Taiwan arranged by Kaohsiung-based Chu Long Travel Service Co (鉅龍旅行社).

“The tour bus industry in Taiwan needs reforms. We have to let tourists around the world know that it is safe to travel in Taiwan and should not let the incident damage the morale of the travel industry and become a disgrace,” Hochen said, adding that he hoped the incident would not dampen Chinese travelers’ interest in visiting Taiwan.

The Directorate-General of Highways (DGH) said that it would work with the Vehicle Safety Certification Center (VSCC) on a random inspection of tour buses.     [FULL  STORY]

The China Post
Date: July 21, 2016
By: Joseph Yeh

TAIPEI, Taiwan — A delegation of Republic of China (Taiwan) lawmakers visited the Taiwan-

controlled Taiping Island (太平島) Wednesday to assert the country’s South China Sea claims after an arbitration court last week controversially deemed the territory a rock rather than an island.

The group comprised eight lawmakers from across party lines and was led by opposition Kuomintang (KMT) Legislator Chiang Chi-chen (江啟臣), who serves as convener of the Legislature’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee.

“There is no denying that Taiping is an island, not a rock as claimed by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague,” Chiang told reporters following the visit.

The trip was also meant to boost the morale of coastguardsmen stationed on the island, he added.     [FULL  STORY]

Taiwan News
Date: 2016-07-19
By: Wendy Lee, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

President Tsai Ing-wen was informed of the tour bus fire incident and has expressed concerns over the tragic news, said the Presidential Office spokesman Alex Huang Tuesday.

An accident occurred Tuesday around 1 p.m. when a tour bus crashed into an expressway guardrail near Taoyuan International Airport, which led to the deaths of 26 people, most of them tourists from China, according to Taiwan’s Tourism Bureau. A Taiwanese tour guide and the bus driver also died from the tragedy.

The bus was reportedly taking the group of tourists to the airport for a flight home at the end of their 8-day trip to Taiwan, according to media reports.     [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2016/07/19
By: Bien Chin-feng and S.C. Chang

Taipei, July 19 (CNA) Prosecutors and fire experts found late Tuesday that an “abnormal” rear exit of the burning bus may have caused the deaths of all 26 people on board earlier that day.

Taoyuan District Prosecutors Office and forensic experts said they had to use tools to rip open the left rear door of the tour bus that carried 24 Chinese passengers, in addition to the bus driver and a Taiwanese tour guide. All perished in the fire near Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport.

The investigators noted that the exit door could have been deformed by the fire, so they were not yet ready to come to a conclusion as to why the passengers were not able to escape.

As many as nine people were piled up close to the rear exit door, so they would not rule out the possibility that the bus riders were so panicked they were unable to open the emergency exit, costing them their lives.

Meanwhile, they did not speculate on the cause of the fire on the bus, saying they have to inspect the remaining structure of the bus before developing a theory on the possible source of ignition and fire.     [FULL  STORY]

Taipei Times
Date: Jul 20, 2016
By: Hsiang Cheng-chen and Jonathan Chin / Staff reporter, with staff writer

Judicial Yuan presidential nominee Hsieh Wen-ting (謝文定) yesterday denied accusations that

he was a prosecutor in charge of multiple controversial cases during the White Terror era, saying that his involvement was limited to “assisting with those investigations.”

Hsieh was accused by 18 judicial reform groups led by the Alliance for Civic Oversight of Supreme Court Justice Nominees and the Judicial Reform Foundation of being the lead prosecutor in multiple White Terror era legal cases that some consider to epitomize human rights violations by the then-authoritarian administration.

The cases included the Jhongli Incident, the Kaohsiung Incident and the murders of relatives of democracy activist Lin I-hsiung (林義雄).

The Jhongli Incident refers to a mass demonstration in 1977 against ballot-rigging by the government in a county commissioner election, and the Kaohsiung Incident, or the Formosa Magazine Incident, refers to a clash between security forces and democracy activists in 1979.     [FULL  STORY]

The China Post
Date: July 19, 2016
By: Christine Chou

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Taiwan has been dropped from two lists ranking the most popular summer

destinations among mainland Chinese tourists, sparking speculation that Beijing ordered the removal.

The events come amid rumors that the Chinese government will declare a complete ban on summer travel to Taiwan starting July 20 — claims denied by the Tourism Bureau, citing information from associations in Beijing and Shanghai.

Leading mainland travel website Lvmama released a report earlier this month purportedly based on travel data for this summer, listing the most common overseas destination for Chinese tourists as Thailand, followed by Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Italy, Indonesia, the U.S., the U.K., France and Singapore.

Also earlier in July, online travel company LY.com issued the results of a travel preference survey, ranking the top 10 destinations as Phuket, Boracay, Seoul, Bali, Tokyo, Bangkok, Nha Trang, Osaka, Hong Kong and Jeju Island.     [FULL  STORY]

Reuters
Date: Jul 19, 2016

A Taiwan tour bus carrying tourists from China crashed into a highway railing en route to the airport on Tuesday and burst into flames, killing all 26 on board, Taiwanese authorities said Tuesday.

The bus was carrying 24 tourists on an eight-day tour organized by a travel agency in China’s northeastern province of Liaoning, authorities said in a statement. The driver and the tour guide, both from Taiwan, were also killed.

“The fire moved very fast. All 26 died,” Lu Jui-yao, an official with the National Highway Police Bureau, told reporters.

Taiwan is a popular destination for mainland tourists, who provide a major source of tourism revenue for the island. Traffic accidents in Taiwan involving Chinese tourists are not uncommon.

China regards Taiwan as a renegade province and for years travel between the two sides was restricted, but tourist exchanges have deepened over the past two decades, with many Chinese visiting the democratically ruled island for the first time.     [FULL  STORY]

Taiwan has reportedly been struck off the list of hottest travel destinations for Chinese. And a satirical campaign celebrating top Taiwan tourism spots ‘without Chinese tourists’ has sparked anger.

The News Lens
Date: 2016/07/19
By: Hsu Chia-yu

Two major Chinese travel websites, LY.com (同程旅遊) and Lvmama Tourism (驢媽媽旅遊),

recently released separate research into the travel trends of Chinese tourists.

Taiwan, which last year ranked 7th most popular destination for Chinese tourists, does not appear in the latest lists of the 10 hottest destinations, according to the Chinese-language United Daily News.

According to research by Skyscanner (天巡網), in 2015 Taiwan was the most popular travel destination for Chinese tourists.

Taiwanese travel agencies say it is unusual for Taiwan, long a hot spot for Chinese tourists, not to be in the top 10 tourism attractions. They say Taiwan’s removal may be a warning sign of increased difficulties in cross-Strait tourism.     [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2016/07/19
By: Ku Chuan, Wu Tze-hao and Lilian Wu

Taipei, July 19 (CNA) All 26 people on a bus taking a Chinese tour group to Taiwan’s main international airport died Tuesday when a fire broke out in the vehicle on the No. 2 National Freeway, authorities said.

The Tourism Bureau said the tour group on the bus was from Liaoning province in China and consisted of 23 tourists, including three children, and a Chinese guide.

It arrived in Taiwan on July 12 for an eight-day tour and was heading to the airport on its final day in Taiwan to catch a 4:30 p.m. flight back to Dalian.

Two Taiwanese on board the ill-fated bus — the bus driver and a tour guide — also lost their lives in the tragedy.     [FULL  STORY]