Focus Taiwan
Date: 03/09/2020
By: Wang Shwu-fen and Joseph Yeh

Kaohsiung, March 9 (CNA) The initiators of a petition to recall Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) submitted approximately 400,000 signatures Monday to the city's election commission pending review as part of a recall process launched last year that could potentially lead to a recall vote in June.

Chen Kuan-jung (陳冠榮), one of the lead petitioners, told reporters that they have collected more than 550,000 signatures so far and decided to submit 400,000 of them — more than the required 228,000 — to the commission for review.

Boxes of signatures are delivered to the Kaohsiung City Election Commission.

Once the city's election commission and the Central Election Commission (CEC) complete the review process and approve the recall proposal, a recall vote on Han could take place June 13 at the earliest, according to Chen.

Aaron Yin (尹立), founder of the pro-recall organization WeCare Kaohsiung, said a number of civic groups decided to jointly launch the recall signature drive in December 2019 because "Han has turned his back on Kaohsiung's citizens."    [FULL  STORY]

Taipei Times
Date: Mar 10, 2020
By: Wang Ting-chuan and William Hetherington / Staff reporter, with staff writer

A New Taipei City man who challenged a fine he received for importing e-cigarettes won the suit, after a district court ruled that the products fell outside of the scope of current tobacco laws.

The man, surnamed Yang (楊), was fined NT$10,000 for contravening the Tobacco Hazards Prevention Act (菸害防制法) when he imported a case of e-cigarettes in May last year.

Saying the fine was unjust, Yang filed an administrative appeal.

In the ruling on Feb. 24, the New Taipei District Court judge said that as the e-cigarettes Yang imported were not in the shape of cigarettes they could not be regulated under the act.
[FULL  STORY]

This is a major, if not long overdue, first step in Taiwan's long and difficult road to naval modernization.

The National Interrest
Date: March 7, 2020
By: Mark Episkopos

Key point: Taipei appears to be coming around to the wisdom of asymmetric submarine warfare

Taipei and Beijing are seemingly sliding into an escalatory spiral amid a flurry of veiled threats and accusations.

Just last week, China’s defense minister invoked Abraham Lincoln to justify the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) increasingly aggressive reunification policy:  “American friends told me that Abraham Lincoln was the greatest American president because he led the country to victory in the Civil War and prevented the secession of the U.S. The U.S. is indivisible, so is China. China must be and will be reunified.” Meanwhile, Taiwan’s government  called on China to “ repent” on the coming 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

Much of the media coverage of the ongoing Taiwan-China dispute is focused on the international repercussions of another Taiwan crisis; more specifically, on how Washington would react to Chinese military aggression against Taiwan.    [FULL  STORY]

BLOG // LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
Date: 03/08/2020
0y: Colin Marshall

Nearly ev0ery day of the past few weeks, all the mobile phones in Seoul have gone off at the same time: some days once, some twice, some more than that. The cause is Korea’s emergency alert system, which in the years I’ve lived here has warned of flood risks, heat waves, and exceptional densities of air pollution. But now, in the time of the novel coronavirus or COVID-19, it announces each new outbreak, with details running to the area of the city in which it occurred. (Other regions of the country get announcements of their own.) The increased frequency of these simultaneous rings and vibrations colors life in Seoul these days, as do the thousands of surgical-masked faces seen in the street, the Mandarin-speakers wearing “I AM FROM TAIWAN” buttons, and the subway-station announcements — repeated over and over again in various languages including an especially loud English — about the importance of thorough hand-washing.

Though I can hardly complain about the greatly increased ease of getting a seat on the subway, nobody can ignore how much more subdued life in Seoul has become, and how quickly. But Seoulites can at least take comfort in the fact that they’re not in Daegu, the city roughly 150 miles to the southeast where the coronavirus made its dramatic Korean debut. (It now seems members of Daegu’s Shincheonji Church of Jesus, one the many religious sects thriving in this country, carried the virus back after a visit to a branch in Wuhan, the Chinese city from which it originated.) Last week I asked an acquaintance from Daegu, who had to make a trip to his hometown for dental work, what the city looks like nowadays: he compared it to I Am Legend, the movie about the aftermath of a virus that kills off 90 percent of humanity.
[FULL  STORY]

Taiwan/ese premier expresses gratitude to all women in country on International Women’s Day

Taiwan News
Date: 2020/03/08
By: Ching-Tse Cheng, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The Taiwanese Cabinet's Gender Equality Committee (GEC) said Sunday (March 8) that women account for 41.59 percent of lawmakers in Taiwan, the most among all the countries in Asia.

According to statistics provided by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), more than 40 percent of the members of the country's 10th legislature are female. The GEC said that Taiwan has the 16th highest percentage of female lawmakers in the world and even surpasses Switzerland, which was ranked first in the latest gender equality assessment by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

The GHC pointed out that close to 43 percent of Taiwanese companies have female supervisors and that the gender wage gap has also narrowed since last year. In addition, the committee noted that the labor force participation rate for Taiwanese women ages 35-39 has passed the 80 percent mark for the first time in history, reported Liberty Times.    [FULL  STORY]

QUICK RESULTS: One of the antibodies has shown ‘perfect’ efficiency in identifying the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, an Academia Sinica researcher said

Taipei Times
Date: Mar 09, 2020
By: Staff writer, with CNA

Academia Sinica yesterday said that it has synthesized monoclonal antibodies that can identify the protein of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, which it said is an important step toward producing a rapid screening reagent for the virus.

The potential reagent, if successfully mass produced, would shorten the testing time for COVID-19 from about four hours to 15 to 20 minutes, significantly improving screening efficiency, the nation’s top academic research institution said in a statement on Facebook.

Yang An-suei (楊安綏), an Academia Sinica research fellow at the Genomics Research Center who headed the team that synthesized the antibodies, said that for rapid screening to work, the reagent should accurately identify the new coronavirus.    [FULL  STORY]

Experts say 'hard and bitter' lessons in dealing with SARS helped Taiwan quickly respond to deadly coronavirus outbreak.

Al Jazeera
Date: March 07, 2020
By: Erin Haleed

Taipei, Taiwan – With some 850,000 Taiwanese living and working in China, Taiwan could have been one of the hardest hit when the coronavirus outbreak emerged in late December in Wuhan, a central Chinese city of 11 million people and the epicentre of the outbreak.

The timing would prove devastating for China and the rest of the world, as the outbreak began to accelerate around Lunar New Year, a time when hundreds of millions of Chinese travel abroad or return home to see their families.

But Taiwan, an island democracy with a population roughly the size of Australia, has kept cases at a minimum of 45 and one death, even as infection rates in China have topped 80,000 and the virus has mushroomed in places like South Korea, Japan, Iran and Italy.

Taiwan's success so far in handling the infection has largely been due to its action in the early stage of the contagion, according to experts, even when the virus was still poorly understood and its transmission rate still unclear.    [FULL  STORY]

Man, believed to be East European, wanted to travel to Palau

Taiwan News
Date: 2020/03/07
By: Matthew Strong, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — A foreign man, believed to be a Russian, was sentenced to five months in prison Saturday (March 7) for jumping on to the landing gear of a flight about to depart for Palau last year.

The Taoyuan District Court found the suspect guilty of violating immigration and aviation laws, CNA reported. His name and identity were never established because he refused to speak, making it difficult to determine whether he was a citizen of Russia or of Belarus, an element which might make his repatriation difficult once he finishes serving his jail term.

Since he had already spent four months in detention, he might only have to spend the remaining one month in prison before his release, CNA reported.    [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 03/07/2020
By: Liu Chien-pang, Christie Chen and Frances Huang

Taipei, March 7 (CNA) The 19 Taiwanese evacuees from the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship were released from quarantine early Saturday, according to the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC).

They were discharged after none of them were confirmed as having contracted the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) following a third round of testing a day earlier. The previous two rounds of testing also came back negative.

The Taiwanese were quarantined on the Diamond Princess cruise liner off Japan's coast last month after the coronavirus was detected in a passenger who had disembarked.

They returned to Taiwan on the night of Feb. 21 on a charter flight from Tokyo and were subsequently placed under quarantine on Feb. 23 for 14 days at a designated facility.
[FULL  STORY]

‘AIR POLLUTION SEASON’: The EPA said air pollution this spring has not been as bad as in previous years, due to closed factories in China as a result of COVID-19

Taipei Times
Date: Mar 08, 2020
By Lo Chi / Staff reporter

Many diseases have been linked to air pollution consisting of fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5) and people should protect themselves, a doctor said yesterday.

Physician Chiang Kun-chun (江坤俊), vice president of the Taoyuan-based Min-Sheng General Hospital, talked about the dangers of air pollution and how people can protect themselves at an event in Taipei’s Daan Forest Park (大安森林公園), which was organized by the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA).

The EPA has designated this year as “Sustainable Earth Year,” with a campaign to promote changing life habits at events throughout the year, and with the spring events focused on air quality.

“Air pollution season” in Taiwan is from October to March every year, EPA Deputy Minister Tsai Hung-te (蔡鴻德) said, adding that this spring has not been as bad as previous years, which he said was due to the suspended operations of factories in China due to an outbreak of COVID-19.    [FULL  STORY]