Breitbart
Date: 17 Apr 2020
By: Thomas D. Williams, PH.D.

ROME — Both China and Taiwan have donated masks and medical supplies to the Vatican in recent days but while the Vatican thanked China publicly it has kept silent over Taiwan’s generosity.

As Breitbart News reported, on April 9 the Vatican issued a glowing public statement thanking the People’s Republic of China for donations of medical supplies to combat the spread of the coronavirus, calling the gesture a sign of China’s “solidarity” with the Holy See.

Yet as noted by Crux, an online Catholic news outlet, China was not alone in coming to the Vatican’s aid. Taiwan has offered similar donations of food and medical supplies to the Vatican and other church institutions in Italy, and yet no public thanks from the Vatican has been forthcoming.

On April 14, Taiwan’s Embassy to the Holy See released a statement announcing they had donated 280,000 medical masks to the Vatican, the Italian bishops, Italian hospitals and various religious institutes in Italy, Crux reported.    [FULL  STORY]

Taipei high court rejects Kaohsiung mayor's request to stop recall election

Taiwan News
Date: 2020/04/17
By: Keoni Everington, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The Taipei High Administrative Court on Friday rejected Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu's (韓國瑜) request to halt a planned vote to have him recalled as mayor.

After a heated two-and-a-half-hour verbal exchange among the lawyers for Chen Kuan-jung (陳冠榮), the founder of the recall movement, Han's attorneys, and the Central Election Commission (CEC), the high court on Friday rejected the mayor's request to suspend the recall election, reported NOWnews. However, Han has the right to appeal the decision.

In the second stage of the petition to recall Han, launched by We Care Kaohsiung (Wecare高雄) among other groups, 400,000 joint signatures were collected. After eliminating duplicates, data errors, and suspected forgeries, 377,662 effective signatures were collected, still far exceeding the minimum threshold of 230,000.

Therefore, the Kaohsiung Election Commission determined that the petition had met the requirements, and the recall vote is expected in mid-June pending final approval by the Central Election Commission (CEC) on April 17.    [FULL  STO-RY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 04/17/2020
By: Chang Ming-hsuan, Chen Wei-ting and Ko Lin

Taipei, April 17 (CNA) When a warning of a mysterious virus sent by a whistleblowing Chinese doctor began filtering out of China at the end of 2019, it marked the starting point of the public phase of the COVID-19 epidemic.

Doctors with Taiwan's Center of Diseases Control (CDC) were among those paying close attention and were convinced enough by what they saw to initiate precautions against the virus.

In the wee hours of Dec. 31, 2019, CDC deputy chief Lo Yi-chun (羅一鈞) could not sleep and was scrolling his phone when an online post shared in a CDC chat group caught his attention.

Quoting information from Chinese websites, the post that appeared on PTT, one of Taiwan's largest internet bulletin board systems (BBS), warned about the potential danger of a SARS-like disease that was spreading in the Chinese city of Wuhan.    [FULL  STORY]

Taipei Times
Date:  Apr 18, 2020
By: Rachel Lin and Jake Chung / Staff reporter, with staff writer

Universities nationwide are changing how they hold graduation ceremonies this year amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

National Sun Yat-sen University president Cheng Ying-yao (鄭英耀) yesterday said that the university, due to its proximity to Kaohsiung’s Sizihwan (西子灣), is to hold its graduation ceremony outdoors on the beach.

The university estimates that about 120 doctoral students would receive their diplomas on June 6, while about 2,000 bachelor’s and master’s degree students would receive their diplomas between June 1 and June 6, Cheng said.

Departments are free to choose whether they would hold their respective ceremonies on the beach or in indoor venues, he added.    [FULL  STORY]

Radio Taiwan International
Date: 16 April, 2020
By: Paula Chao

The government has announced two more charter flights that will bring citizens stranded in China by the COVID-19 pandemic back home.

The two flights will depart from Shanghai on April 20 and 21. Each is expected to carry around 220 Taiwanese citizens. That’s more than half of the 700 or so citizens still in China.
[FULL  STORY]

Despite diplomatic exclusion, Taiwan has worked to provide wide-scale humanitarian assistance during the COVID-19 pandemic — and beyond.

The Diplomat
Date:\ 0April 16, 2020
By: Marcin Jerzewski and Kuan-Ting Chen

An unexpected consequence of the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak has been the recent shift in rhetoric on Taiwan among several high-ranking global political figures. Take Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, as an example. Although the EU has previously remained assertive in its adherence to the Beijing formulation of a “One China policy,” Taiwan’s generous donation of much sought-after medical supplies to several member states prompted the top EU official to directly address Taiwan in a message of thanks.

Even though Taiwan’s generous assistance to Western countries stricken by the pandemic, as well as its effective containment of the virus domestically, finally provided media attention to the island, not all responses have been positive. World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recently accused the Taiwanese Foreign Ministry of instigating the threats and racist abuse he has received in recent months. “This attack came from Taiwan,” said Tedros, the WHO’s first African leader. Importantly, the allegations emerged after a number of politicians from around the globe spoke up in favor of Taiwan’s participation in the work of the WHO, and as many voiced their criticism of the WHO’s questionable handling of the pandemic. It is noteworthy that Tedros consistently defended China’s response to the coronavirus outbreak while continuously ignoring warnings and best practices shared by Taiwan.

The Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well as President Tsai Ing-wen promptly dismissed the allegations as “baseless,” and emphasized that there was no evidence of Taiwan’s encouragement or participation in racist attacks against Tedros. It would be futile to argue that Taiwan is entirely free from the ills of racism. Instead, it is important to consider how it continues to support its overseas partners in their quest to strengthen their healthcare systems, while being systematically discriminated against by the international community. The recent donation of crucial medical supplies to Western countries is, of course, a much-needed response to the global health crisis without precedent in living memory. Nevertheless, we argue that it ought to be understood in the context of Taiwan’s long-standing commitment to acting as a responsible stakeholder within the global public health regime.    [FULL  STORY]

American vlogger creates video listing 20 ways Taiwan is keeping Wuhan coronavirus at bay

Taiwan News
Date: 2020/04/16
By: Keoni Everington, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — As Taiwan sees its second day with zero new cases of Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) in a week, an American blogger has created a video expounding on how the plucky island country has been able to fend off the contagion, despite its proximity to communist China, the origin of the outbreak.

The video's creator, Dustin Pfundheller, 33, who is currently living in Florida where he works as a dentist, told Taiwan News that he created the video because he was so impressed that Taiwan, a country that is at an extremely high risk of a COVID-19 outbreak, had so few cases. He said that he first became acquainted with Taiwan when he studied at Shih Hsin University in the fall of 2007 and wanted both foreigners and Taiwanese to know what Taiwan had done to protect their citizens from the deadly disease.

The video, which was uploaded to Facebook on April 9, starts by explaining that before the outbreak started, four percent of Taiwanese worked in China, while 2,000 Chinese tourists on average visited the country per day. Pfundheller then pointed out that the epidemic first started during the Lunar New Year, the busiest time of the year for travel in both Taiwan and China, similar to Thanksgiving in the U.S.

He noted that despite the fact that Taiwan had initially been ranked as the second-highest country at risk of experiencing a major breakout of the virus by a Johns Hopkins University model, it actually now has the lowest case rate per million over the past 50 days in the world. To counter claims that only authoritarian regimes have been effective at containing the virus, Pfundheller stated the fact that Taiwan is a democracy.    [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 04/16/2020
By: Flor Wang and Yang Si-jey

Taipei, April 16 (CNA) Catholic priest Brendan O'Connell (甘惠忠), founder of the Bethlehem Foundation who devoted most of his life to charitable works in Taiwan, died in New York Thursday aged 84.

"Our much respected Father O'Connell died this morning and is now resting in God's love. We will miss him and continue with the task that he left us. We hereby tell God that we will bravely move on and do what he would want us to do to accomplish his mission," the foundation said in a post on Facebook.

According to Tainan-based Bethlehem Foundation Executive Secretary Chen Cheng-lin (陳正霖), O'Connell had lived in the U.S. in recent years due to health problems.

He last came to Taiwan in 2018 to attend the opening of the foundation's Infant Developmental Center Merciful Mother Kindergarten, though the foundation made regular phone calls and kept in touch with him. Chen said.    [FULL  STORY]

Taipei Times
Date:  Apr 17, 2020
By: Chen Feng-li and Jake Chung / Staff reporter, with staff writer

With traditional crafts waning and lacking in successors, 20-year-old Chang Hao-wei (張皓瑋) two years ago decided to forgo university and take over his grandfather’s budaixi, or glove puppetry, troupe.

As his grandfather founded the troupe and his father worked as its sound engineer, Chang said that he grew up on the set and had learned from a young age how to handle puppets.

Becoming the head of the troupe at the age of 18, Chang is likely the youngest troupe master in the nation, a position that comes with many duties.

At the troupe’s first performance under new management, Chang said that he designed the puppets and wrote the script for the play, he said, adding that he was also the narrator and the dramatist at the event.    [FULL  STORY]

Radio Taiwan Internatiopnal
Date: 15 April, 2020
By: John Van Trieste

Taiwan reported two new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday. The new cases bring the total number Taiwan has reported so far up to 395.

The patients in both new cases had recently returned to Taiwan from the US.    [FULL  STORY]