title: Taiwan, COVID-19 and the world

content_text:
A day does not go by without some news or media update about the spread of COVID-19. It is impossible to even remember exactly when it was not like this. Such is the nature of the pandemic that is crisscrossing the world.

Cities and countries are on lockdown. People are hoarding. Health services are being overtaxed. Racism has also grown rampant as non-involved Asians around the world are being blamed for what originated from a bureaucratic cover-up in Wuhan, China.

There are innumerable lessons to be learned from this, far too many to be listed here. This article will focus on two.

The first deals with the macro-level reality of an ever-developing paradigm shift from a global village to a global home and what that means.

Globalization has been entrenched in practice for centuries as nations regularly participated in intercontinental trade and commerce.

Its practice only became associated with the name “global village” as the links between raw materials, manufacturing, marketing and distribution became unavoidably evident after World War II. Companies needed a new business model and name.

However, viruses do not respect borders, names or business models. You cannot forbid them, command them to follow orders or tell them to stay in place.

Like the plagues and pestilences of old, they cross all borders with impunity and strike at people of all ages. They can savage a “village” just like a nation, a continent or a world; they force people to realize that wherever they are, they live in the same house.

Similarly, ideologies, religion, race, color, class, culture etc. mean nothing to a virus. It is a great leveler and disrespects them all. That is the macro message it brings.

On this macro level, businesspeople could easily come to accept the “global village paradigm” because in that paradigm they could still maintain a certain sense of boundaries. A village can have its rich and its poor; it can have a fashionable side where the “haves” live and another side where the “have nots” live. It can still maintain exclusive sections and divisions.

A global home paradigm is philosophically more difficult to accept because it pushes all to admit to a home equality; people do not want to say they live in the same home as those who they are prejudiced against or whose background they disapprove of.

However, as COVID-19 scours the planet, that admission becomes unavoidable. A different message is now heard, one by which the consciousness of humanity’s interconnectedness becomes evident and promotes the global home image.

That message is: “We are all in this together.”

This message calls for a shift in thinking from the old paradigm. True, on the one hand, borders can be and have been sealed; likewise within those borders, social distancing can be and has been required.

However, to carry this out, people still must acknowledge that “we are all in this together.”

No nation, no city, no neighborhood, no person is exempt. The only way to defeat such a virus is with a united effort from all.

Wherever one is, whether within or outside any locked down area, complete cooperation is needed. A neighborhood, a city, a nation, a continent — the world is only as strong as its weakest link. No one person can claim that the rules only apply to others.

This is the global home consciousness that fits. Regardless of race, religion, creed, and even linguistic practices and/or cultural beliefs, everyone belongs to one family: the human race. Everyone lives in one home, on one planet: the planet Earth. We are all in this together.

This same message had been heard before with global warming, but in that instance the effect was never that immediate. There, the sense of eventual destruction could be put off to sometime in a vague future. Life could go on.

It has taken a rampant virus and a worldwide pandemic to wake everyone up to the reality of this new perspective. Death is swift and the body count is unavoidable.

What follows this message of interdependence therefore is that no group, no people, no individual can be left out of finding a solution, most especially if they can make a solid contribution.

That brings us to the micro message of COVID-19 and the continued exclusion of Taiwan from the WHO and the World Health Assembly (WHA). In each, Taiwan cannot even participate as an observer.

Why then is Taiwan, a capable nation with a strong medical history that is willing to assist, not allowed to help find a solution?

Taiwan is clearly part of the global home and global family. Independently, Taiwan has sealed its borders, set its own quarantines and handled its virus cases far better than most. Yet, like an orphan it is rejected by the WHO and WHA; it is not allowed at the table.

The reason is simple. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) still makes unsubstantiated claims to Taiwan’s territory, and continues to put the world in clear and present danger simply because it wishes to play zero-sum games with organizational membership.

The game the PRC is playing has a most deadly, but realistic added irony. At the end of last year, because of its strong medical knowledge and experience with SARS, Taiwan, looking in from the outside, had warned the WHO of the possibility and threat of human-to-human transmission of COVID-19. This warning was ignored because of the PRC.

Even if the PRC tries to play catchup, other nations must remember that despite its current efforts, it initially tried to cover up the reality of the source of the virus. After that, it stonewalled Taiwan’s contribution, until finally three weeks later it was forced to admit the truth.

By then the damage had been done: The virus had been loosed around the world, resulting in lockdowns, insufferable economic disruption and rising death tolls.

This is the hypocrisy of the PRC and even that of the WHO/WHA. It is a hypocrisy that must be dealt with in the micro reality that the virus reveals. Taiwan belongs in the WHA.

The PRC, of course, still insists that it is Taiwan’s “parent” and should represent the de facto independent Taiwan. If it cannot, the PRC still irresponsibly claims that it will take its ball and go home.

Zero-sum games do not work in a global home paradigm and it is time for other nations to face up to this, as death tolls around the world rise.

Likewise, there are no parents in the global home paradigm. Solutions must be worked out by all nations as family members living and working under the same roof. The human race is at risk.

This virus will have its death toll and eventually pass. However, there will always be another virus.

The time has come, therefore, for all nations to tell the PRC that if it wants to play its zero-sum games, it can only play them in non-essential matters. Taiwan must be recognized for the reality it is and the contributions it can make.

Jerome Keating is a writer based in Taipei.

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title: Virus Outbreak: Tokyo staff say emergency already here

content_text:
As Japan faces a fresh wave of COVID-19 infections and the government prepares for a state of emergency, medical staff have said that a shortage of beds and a rise in cases linked to hospitals are pushing Tokyo’s medical system to the brink of collapse.

The crisis has already arrived at Eiju General Hospital, a pink, 10-story building in central Tokyo, which has reported 140 cases in the past two weeks. Of those, at least 44 are doctors, nurses and other medical staff.

On a recent weekday, the glass doors of Eiju General were plastered with posters saying that the hospital was closed until further notice.

More than 60 patients with the virus are still being treated inside.

One person who was transferred to another hospital infected others, officials in Tokyo’s Taito ward said.

Japan has only a small fraction of the number of cases reported by its neighbors China and South Korea. Yet scenarios similar to that at Eiju General are playing out across Tokyo, as a dozen doctors and nurses in the city told reporters that there is a shortage of gear and staff even as infections surge.

“We could empty out an entire ward and use it just for corona patients, but that means those patients [with other illnesses] will have to go elsewhere,” said a doctor specializing in infectious diseases at a major hospital in the greater Tokyo area. “If we can’t do that, it will lead to the virus spreading all through the hospital and lead to a collapse of our medical system.”

Official data tell a similar story. Tokyo’s government said that as of Sunday, 951 people with COVID-19 were hospitalized; in a live YouTube address that night, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike said there were about 1,000 beds allocated for coronavirus patients in the city.

Even as other countries have locked down borders and ramped up testing, Japan appeared to have side-stepped the kind of mass infections seen elsewhere — an effect some experts have said was mostly due to a lack of testing.

In the early stages of the epidemic, Japan was also weighing whether to postpone the Summer Olympics, a decision that eventually came late last month.

Since the middle of January, Japan has tested 39,446 people, while the UK has tested 173,784 and South Korea has conducted 443,273 tests, Oxford University data showed.

Authorities have tried to test and track in a way that avoided overwhelming Japan’s hospitals, said Hitoshi Oshitani, an infectious disease specialist on the government panel shaping the country’s coronavirus policy.

Despite that, the total number of positive cases nationwide nearly doubled in the past seven days to 3,654. Tokyo is now the largest hub for COVID-19 in Japan, with more than 1,000 confirmed cases.

With cases surging, some who tested positive have had to briefly wait at home or in outpatient sections of hospitals until beds became available, officials said.

Koike said that to ease the burden on medical staff, Tokyo would transfer people with mild symptoms into hotels and other accommodations starting today.

Hiroshi Nishiura, a Hokkaido University professor and member of a panel advising the government on its coronavirus response, said Eiju General, like many Tokyo hospitals, has no infectious disease department.

That meant coronavirus patients were initially treated alongside everyone else, allowing the virus to spread.

On Friday, another hospital in Tokyo said that three nurses and one doctor had been infected while treating patients.

The next day, Tokyo saw its daily coronavirus cases top 100 for the first time, and on Sunday 143 people tested positive.

A representative for the Tokyo Metropolitan Government yesterday said that “the medical system remains secure,” adding that Tokyo was continuing to urge residents to avoid all unnecessary outings.

Contagion is an enormous risk in dense Tokyo, a city of nearly 14 million people. Japan also has one of world’s oldest populations, with nearly one-third of the country — 36 million people — older than 65.

According to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, there are about 1.5 million hospital beds nationwide, but beds in negative-pressure rooms reserved for infectious diseases excluding tuberculosis have dwindled to just 1,882, with only 145 in Tokyo.

Although people with COVID-19 do not all need such rooms, they still must be kept apart from other patients.

In the past few days, Tokyo officials have been scrambling to secure 4,000 beds for coronavirus patients, asking hospitals to free up space in ordinary wards and even offering financial incentives, one city official with direct knowledge of the planning said.

He declined to be named, as he was not authorized to speak to media.

“There isn’t that much capacity [of hospital beds] left in Tokyo, so a [medical collapse] is no longer unforeseeable,” said Satoshi Kamayachi, an executive board member of the Japan Medical Association, which has pushed Japan to call for a state of emergency. “The number of patients is clearly rising, so the situation is becoming more urgent.”

Even after Japan drew fire for how it handled patients on the cruise ship Diamond Princess, it did little to step up testing and preparations, some critics said.

Tokyo Assemblyman Akihiro Suzuki on Jan. 31 wrote to Koike, asking her to set up a medical and consultation system for coronavirus cases.

“The response was slow and even now it’s [too] slow,” he said.

Nurses told reporters that they were not sure whether their hospitals had enough advanced personal protective equipment such as N95 masks and plastic gowns.

“The other day I saw a news report that a nurse wearing a trash bag as protective gear died in New York and I wondered if that’ll be me in the future,” one nurse in her 30s told reporters.

Like many other medical workers, she declined to be named, because she is not allowed to speak to the media.

Kasumi Matsuda, who works for the Japan Federation of Medical Workers’ Unions and was a nurse for 13 years, said many of its 170,000 members had also reported a lack of protective gear.

“I think the system is already beginning to fall apart,” she said.

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title: Taiwan Business Quick Take

content_text:
AUTO PARTS

BizLink sales slump

Wire harness maker BizLink Holding Inc (貿聯) yesterday posted consolidated sales of US$54.95 million for last month, a 4.27 percent month-on-month and 10.72 percent year-on-year decrease. The company blamed the fall on the COVID-19 pandemic that has caused many nations to impose a variety of restrictions, negatively affecting global supply chains. BizLink, an exclusive harness supplier to US electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc, said cumulative sales in the first quarter were US$164.41 million, down 7.35 percent from the same period last year.

INTERNET

Vivotek sees weak demand

Internet security solutions provider Vivotek Inc (晶睿科技) yesterday posted revenue of NT$589 million (US$19.48 million) for last month, an 18.47 percent month-on-month increase, but down 6.7 percent from a year earlier. As the firm’s three major plants are in Taiwan and it has a sufficient supply of raw materials, the COVID-19 pandemic has not had a substantial impact on production, Vivotek said. However, the escalating outbreak, and lockdowns in the US and Europe, would likely lead to weakening demand, it said. Revenue in the first quarter was NT$1.58 billion, up 17.04 percent quarter-on-quarter, but down 7.76 percent year-on-year.

MEMORY CHIPS

Adata revenue soars

Adata Technology Co (威剛科技), the world’s second-largest memory module supplier, yesterday posted revenue of NT$2.86 billion for last month, up 16.82 percent from NT$2.45 billion in February, as it benefited from rising shipments in the DRAM and solid-state drive (SSD) segments. That was 25.96 percent higher than NT$2.27 billion the previous year and the highest in 20 months, company data showed. Adata revenue rose 12.13 percent year-on-year to NT$7.19 billion in the first quarter, with the DRAM segment contributing 45.5 percent of sales, SSD 31.2 percent and NAND flash memory 12.85 percent.

PERIPHERALS

Chicony bullish on Q2

Chicony Power Technology Co (群光電能), which makes computer peripherals, yesterday posted consolidated revenue of NT$2.76 billion for last month, an 82.2 percent month-on-month and 2.2 percent year-on-year increase, and the highest level for March in the company’s history. Consolidated revenue in the first quarter decreased 7.2 percent year-on-year to NT$6.71 billion, less than the company’s guidance of a fall of 8 to 10 percent. The company resumed full production in China at the end of last month, which would help boost shipments this quarter, Chicony Power president Peter Tseng (曾國華) said. The company could benefit from rush orders for power supplies used in commercial and education-based laptops as remote working and online teaching become more prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic, analysts said.

ELECTRONICS

HTC sales inch higher

HTC Corp (宏達電) yesterday posted consolidated sales of NT$432.25 million for last month, a 3.13 percent increase from a month earlier and ending two consecutive months of decline. However, last month’s sales were 67.07 percent lower than the same period last year. HTC attributed the decline to lower shipments. Cumulative sales in the first quarter were NT$1.33 billion, down 54.83 percent year-on-year, the company said in a regulatory filing.

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content_text:
SADDENED:
 Michael Atkinson defended his forwarding of a whistleblower’s complaint to Congress and urged other inspectors general to continue protecting whistleblowers

The ousted inspector general of the intelligence community said he was “disappointed and saddened” that US President Donald Trump fired him, but he also encouraged other inspectors general to continue to speak out when they are aware of wrongdoing.

Trump notified Congress late on Friday evening that he intended to fire Michael Atkinson, a pivotal figure in his impeachment last year, because he had lost confidence in him.

On Saturday, Trump made it clear that the move had been retaliatory, telling reporters that Atkinson was a “disgrace” and had done “a terrible job,” because he had provided an anonymous whistleblower complaint to Congress — a move that was required by law.

Atkinson said in the statement, sent to reporters late on Sunday, that “it is hard not to think that the president’s loss of confidence in me derives from my having faithfully discharged my legal obligations as an independent and impartial inspector general, and from my commitment to continue to do so.”

Atkinson was required by law to notify Congress of the complaint, which was written by an anonymous intelligence official and detailed Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate Democrats.

The inspector general had deemed it urgent and credible, meaning that he was required to share it with the intelligence committees of the US House of Representatives and Senate.

However, the acting director of national intelligence at the time, Joseph Maguire, overruled him for several weeks.

After a firestorm sparked by media reports of the complaint, it was turned over and made public in September last year, and a congressional inquiry into the matter led to Trump’s impeachment by the House in December.

The Republican-led Senate acquitted Trump in February.

Atkinson said in the e-mail that he was legally obligated to “ensure that whistleblowers had an effective and authorized means to disclose urgent matters involving classified information to the congressional intelligence committees,” and that such whistleblowers were protected against reprisal.

Trump repeatedly called for the whistleblower’s name to be revealed.

Atkinson also directed his message to other inspectors general, saying that he knows they will “continue to do everything in their power” to continue to protect whistleblowers.

“Please do not allow recent events to silence your voices,” he wrote.

Atkinson’s statement was sent to reporters by email on Sunday evening and was copied to Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency Executive Director Alan Boehm.

Boehm confirmed the authenticity of the letter in a follow-up e-mail exchange with The Associated Press.

On Saturday, Trump questioned why Atkinson did not speak to him about the complaint.

The inspector general’s role is to provide independent oversight.

“Never came in to see me, never requested to see me,” Trump said.

“That man is a disgrace to IGs [inspectors general],” he added.

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title: Ousted inspector general says disappointed


title: Why concentration camps are still with us — part II

content_text:
Mass internment camps are far from a thing of the past, but Britain’s Boer War concentration camps illustrate how a society can make excuses for a mass crime

When something today is described as a concentration camp, it almost always provokes an angry dispute. If camps are not being used to exterminate people, as they have been in their worst instances, then the comparison is frequently condemned as inappropriate.

However, condemnation can be a way for governments to shield themselves from criticism of their decisions, and from criticism of the legitimacy of state power itself.

In 2018, US President Donald Trump’s government responded to a rise in the number of undocumented migrants — many of whom were asylum seekers fleeing violence in Central America — crossing the US-Mexico border by drastically increasing the use of long-term immigration detention.

Reports of overcrowding, filthy conditions and the denial of due process for asylum claims soon followed, accompanied by measures that seemed intended to make a symbolic display of cruelty, such as the separation of young children from their parents.

In June last year, amid the outcry from opponents of this policy, US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recorded a video for her Instagram followers.

“The US is running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is exactly what they are,” she said. “I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘never again’ means something.”

This was a political intervention intended to shock people into challenging the Trump government’s immigration policy — and in the row that ensued, some commentators objected that Ocasio-Cortez’s reference to concentration camps and her use of the phrase “never again” was an inappropriate Holocaust analogy.

As US historian Deborah Lipstadt said: “Something can be horrible and not be like the Holocaust.”

However, much of the response from Ocasio-Cortez’s Republican opponents was to downplay the extent of abuses happening as a result of Trump’s policies, or to portray what was happening as normal and routine.

Some pointed out, for instance, that Trump was only making modifications to a system built by his predecessors: Deportations of undocumented immigrants, for instance, reached their peak under former US president Barack Obama.

These sorts of equivocations have accompanied the use of camps from their inception, and they always try to give the same impression: That what is being done is normal and legitimate; that criticisms are overblown, marginal and extreme; and that states have the right to behave this way.

The story of Britain’s concentration camps during the Boer War illustrates how a society that thinks of itself as liberal can make excuses for a mass crime. In 1899, when the British empire went to war against two breakaway Afrikaner republics in South Africa, it set up a network of camps that quickly expanded to detain several hundred thousand people.

At first the camps were justified as “protection” for Boer civilians who had signed an oath of loyalty; later, they were used to imprison Boer “undesirables” who had not signed the oath, as well as black South Africans who the British forced off their land to make them act as lookouts for troops.

Due to poor sanitation, meager food rations and overcrowding, diseases such as typhoid and measles frequently ripped through the camps; at least 28,000 white people and 20,000 black people were killed by this system in just a few years.

The two most prominent critics of Britain’s camps — feminist campaigners Emily Hobhouse and Millicent Fawcett — had to struggle against political and public opinion that initially saw the camps as a wartime necessity, and fought hard to alleviate suffering.

However, the grounds on which they did so were radically different, as British author Vron Ware has said.

Fawcett, who visited South Africa with the government’s approval to produce a report on the camps, saw her concern for the welfare of vulnerable civilians as compatible with the wider aims of the camps.

“Saving the children,” for her, was “as true a service to the country as that which men were rendering by going into the armies to serve in the field.”

For Hobhouse, who was the first prominent activist to visit South Africa and expose conditions in the camps, British military values and the nationalism that underpinned them were the fundamental problem. She was challenging the legitimacy of state power itself.

Hobhouse, who in her day was derided in sexist terms as a “mad” old lady, is now largely forgotten in the UK, while it is safe to say that Britain’s concentration camps are not well remembered: Last year, the Conservative politician Jacob Rees-Mogg defended their use on an episode of Question Time, erroneously claiming that their mortality rate was only the same as that of Glasgow at the time.

However, without Hobhouse’s radical critique, it would have been harder to oppose the harm done by Britain’s camps a century ago, and would be harder to understand why camps still appear in the world today.

The point of historical comparisons should not be to find identical situations — no two events in history are identical — but to alert us to potential dangers in the way states exercise power.

Not everyone, for instance, reacted with outrage to Ocasio-Cortez’s comments last year. While she drew criticism from some Jewish organizations, including a rebuke from the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, the row also energized a US protest movement against Trump’s immigration policy led by left-wing Jewish activists. The movement calls itself Never Again Action, explicitly drawing on a collective memory of persecution.

In his final book, The Drowned and the Saved, Auschwitz survivor and author Primo Levi reflected on the conditions that had made the Nazi camps possible, and wondered what lessons, if any, could be applied to a world that had moved on.

The unique combination of factors that had unleashed the horror of Nazism was unlikely to return, he said, but that should not obscure the danger of violence in our own time, or the politicians who seek to wield it.

Violence, he wrote, “is there before our eyes ... it only awaits its new buffoon [there is no dearth of candidates] to organize it, legalize it, declare it necessary and mandatory and so contaminate the world.”

If the state as we know it is here to stay, then what can people do when governments start building camps? The history of the concentration camp has also been a history of people’s resistance to camps, from inside and out. Even in the most seemingly hopeless situations there are stories of people who have fought back against their treatment.

The uprisings in the Nazi death camps of Sobibor and Treblinka are among the most famous; and the Soviet Gulag system was beset by strikes and revolts. On their own, these might not have been enough, but camps work by enforcing a rigid distinction between people on opposite sides of the barbed-wire fence. Those inside are kept silent and invisible, while those outside are encouraged to ignore or accept what is happening.

Successful resistance aims at breaking down this distinction: Governments know this, and even states that operate relatively mild forms of mass detention make significant efforts to obscure the conditions inside, and to deter their own citizens from prying too closely.

One evening in February this year, I watched the Kurdish author Behrouz Boochani give a talk by video link to an audience at Birkbeck, University of London.

Boochani, who lives in New Zealand, spent four years in Australia’s “regional offshore processing center” for asylum seekers on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea.

Australia has pioneered a type of long-term detention for unwanted migrants that is becoming more common elsewhere in the world.

Boochani and his fellow detainees were not merely being held for “processing,” but in harsh conditions intended to act as a deterrent to future travelers.

The Australian government forbade journalists to report on the full extent of these conditions, which included the beating and abuse of detainees, and introduced a law threatening doctors and social workers with up to two years in prison if they spoke in public about what they had witnessed.

However, Boochani smuggled out accounts of life in detention, via text messages sent to his translator by WhatsApp, that were turned into articles for the Guardian and other outlets — as well as a memoir, No Friend But the Mountains.

Boochani told reporters how he saw his detention as part of Australia’s — and Britain’s — longer history of treating non-white people as disposable.

“It’s worse than a prison,” he said of the Manus camp. “It’s a place where they take your identity and freedom from you, and try to destroy you.”

Detainees were given numbers, he said, which the guards used instead of their names; his was MEG45.

The camp on Manus Island was eventually shut down by the Australian government, after widespread public criticism, although its broader asylum policies remain largely the same.

For Boochani, writing was not simply a way to expose his conditions and link up with campaigners against detention on the outside, but to challenge the very basis on which the treatment of people like him was justified.

“I never use the language and the words that the [Australian] government use,” he said. “I say ‘systematic torture,’ I say ‘political prisoner.’”

One of the things that gave him hope in confinement, he said, was the fact that animals could wander in and out of the spaces where human freedom was limited — a reminder that the structure which held him was built by people, and could therefore also be dismantled.

“Nature,” he said, “always tried to reimpose itself on the prison.”

This is part two of a two-part article. Part one ran in yesterday’s edition.

Daniel Trilling is a British journalist, editor and author. He was the editor of New Humanist magazine from 2013 until last year.

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title: Cyclone Harold lashes Vanuatu

content_text:
CORONAVIRUS-FREE:
 With Harold escalating into a Category 5 superstorm, Vanuatu runs the risk of importing the virus into the nation if it has to turn to international aid

A deadly Pacific cyclone yesterday intensified as it hit Vanuatu, threatening a natural disaster that experts fear would undermine the impoverished nation’s battle to remain coronavirus-free.

Tropical Cyclone Harold, which claimed 27 lives when it swept through the Solomon Islands last week, strengthened to a scale-topping Category 5 superstorm overnight, Vanuatu’s meteorology service said.

The cyclone is now packing winds of up to 235kph, prompting red alerts across several provinces.

People board up their shops in Vanuatu’s capital, Port Vila, yesterday in preparation for Cyclone Harold.
 Photo: AFP

It made landfall on the remote east coast of Espiritu Santo island yesterday morning and was heading directly for Vanuatu’s second-largest town, Luganville, which has a population of 16,500.

The slow-moving storm was expected to pass north of the capital, Port Vila, early today.

“For now, we don’t have any reports of injury, but lots of damage,” Red Cross Vanuatu secretary general Jacqueline de Gaillande said.

Another concern is the impact a large natural disaster could have on Vanuatu’s attempts to remain one of the world’s few countries without any reported COVID-19 infections.

The nation has sealed its international borders to avoid the virus, but emergency measures, including bans on public meetings, have been temporarily suspended so people can gather in evacuation centers.

“There have been no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Vanuatu, but a significant disaster at this time could present serious logistical challenges to delivering life-saving aid,” Oxfam’s Vanuatu director Elizabeth Faerua said.

A major international relief effort was needed the last time a Category 5 system, Cyclone Pam, hit Vanuatu in 2015.

If a similar operation were needed in the wake of Cyclone Harold, it would run the risk of importing the virus to a nation that lacks the health infrastructure to deal with even a mild outbreak.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern raised concerns about the cyclone and said the Kiwi military was ready to deploy if needed, even though New Zealand is on COVID-19 lockdown.

Cyclone Harold “looks like it’s coming into the Pacific with considerable force,” she told reporters.

“Our defense force is at the ready, that’s the role they play regardless of what’s going on in New Zealand,” she said.

Cyclone Pam flattened Port Vila, killed 11 people and left a swath of destruction that the World Bank estimated wiped out almost two-thirds of Vanuatu’s economic capacity.

De Gaillande said Vanuatu’s government could face a balancing act between helping communities devastated by the storm and potentially importing the virus by allowing in international aid.

“We will need international aid, but we’re hoping initially it will be through funding only, so we can buy supplies and help those most in need,” she said.

“We have a lot of skilled people on the ground here already” to carry our disaster operations, she said.

Cyclone Harold has already caused widespread damage in the Solomon Islands, where an inter-island ferry ignored weather warnings and 27 people were washed off its decks.

Solomons police on Sunday said that the bodies of five passengers from the MV Taimareho had been recovered and the search would resume the next day.

“I would like to thank everyone ... involved in the search for the missing 27 people so far as we try as much as possible to find the bodies so their grieving relatives can give them a proper burial,” Solomons Chief Superintendent Richard Menapi said.

The ferry set off from Honiara for Malaita island on Thursday night, packed with more than 700 people as part of a government evacuation program in response to the virus crisis.

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content_text:
A: During the spring break, I went home and swept the ancestral tombs.

B: I do hope you observed “social distancing.”

A: Ha, yes, of course! Our family ancestral tombs are up on a hill, so they’re outdoors, and it’s very spacious there.

B: I always think it’s a bit weird when I hear of people doing the tomb sweeping over the long weekend; our family always gets it done right after Lunar New Year, too.

A : 我春假的時候，回老家去幫祖先掃墓。

B : 你們有確實保持「社交距離」嗎？

A : 哈哈，當然有啊！而且我們家祖墳在山上，所以是露天的，那裡還算空曠。

B : 我每次聽到大家清明連假去掃墓都很納悶，因為我們家過完農曆年就先掃完了。

English 英文:

Chinese 中文:

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title: EVERYDAY ENGLISH


content_text:
The Polish government is divided and reportedly struggling for its survival over whether to hold a presidential election next month during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The parliament yesterday was to vote on a proposal put forward by ruling party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski to hold the May 10 election by postal vote.

However, one faction in the governing coalition is opposed and wants the election postponed until after the epidemic.

Spring party leader and presidential candidate Robert Biedron attends a press conference on the coronavirus situation at the Polish parliament building in Warsaw yesterday.
 Photo: EPA-EFE

The parliament had been expected to vote on Friday on the postal option, but that got delayed by the disagreement.

“At a time that the state is experiencing its biggest problems in 30 years due to the coronavirus, the power camp is caught up in an internal war,” an analysis in the online news portal Onet said.

“Our sources in the governing camp are unanimous in stressing that this crisis could lead to the collapse of the government,” Andrzej Gajcy and Andrzej Stankiewicz wrote.

Polish President Andrzej Duda is vying for a second five-year term. The ruling Law and Justice party — which supports Duda — has been seeking a way to go ahead with the voting, with polls showing Duda far ahead of his rivals.

Law and Justice leaders want to hold the vote now to consolidate power at a time of crisis. Many feel if Duda were to face a vote in a few months, when the economic pain of the coronavirus lockdown is more painfully felt, he would be less likely to win.

The main opposition party, Civic Platform, has been calling for the government to declare a state of emergency, a legal step that would trigger an automatic postponement of the election.

Opposition lawmakers say holding an election during the pandemic would be undemocratic because opposition candidates cannot travel across the nation of 38 million people to campaign due to a strict government-ordered lockdown as the number of infections rises. Duda, meanwhile, still profits from heavy coverage on state media.

Poland has more than 4,200 infections and 98 deaths from the coronavirus.

Law and Justice officials insist that the current election timeline — voting on May 10 with a runoff on May 24 if no candidate wins 50 percent in the first round — is dictated by the constitution and should not be changed.

There have also been questions about whether the postal service, which is already struggling, is prepared to handle ballots from 30 million registered voters. One union leader said other authorities, including the army, might have to help.

In preparation for a possible postal vote next month, Kaczynski last week appointed the deputy defense minister to be the new head of the postal service.

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title: Polish government split on proceeding with May 10 poll


title: Virus Outbreak: Virus-hit cruise liner docks in Australia

content_text:
Carnival Corp’s troubled Ruby Princess cruise liner, the biggest single source of coronavirus infections in Australia, yesterday docked south of Sydney at Port Kembla to get help for sick crew members requiring urgent medical treatment.

The Ruby Princess, now the target of a criminal investigation led by the homicide squad in the state of New South Wales (NSW), has more than 1,000 crew still on board, after passengers disembarked in the middle of last month without health checks.

There have been at least 360 COVID-19 cases, including passengers and staff, associated with the vessel, which includes at least six deaths.

A fisherman watches as the Ruby Princess, with only crew on board, docks at Port Kembla, Australia, yesterday.
 Photo: EPA-EFE

NSW police said in a statement that the vessel might remain in place for up to 10 days, but the crew would not disembark unless approved by state authorities.

Sick crew members were being treated on board or transferred to hospital, police said, and the vessel would be refueled in preparation for departure.

Australia has more than 5,700 confirmed COVID-19 cases and its death toll rose to 39 yesterday after four additional deaths were recorded overnight.

An investigation into Ruby Princess protocols would focus on communications and actions that led to the docking and disembarking of the ship’s 2,700 passengers on March 19 at Sydney Harbour to see whether biosecurity laws or state laws were broken, authorities said.

State health authorities had classed the ship as low risk, and the Australian Border Force issued a notice allowing the passengers to travel home freely.

They were required to self-isolate for 14 days.

A Carnival Australia spokesman said that the company would cooperate with the probe.

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title: Van Avermaet wins Tour of Flanders from his attic

content_text:
Olympic road race champion Greg van Avermaet on Sunday said that winning the virtual edition of the Tour of Flanders, held instead of the real race due to the COVID-19 pandemic, was “funny.”

Van Avermaet, 35, was joined by 12 other cyclists in racing the final 32km of De Ronde, one of cycling’s five one-day “Monuments,” which was broadcast online after being postponed due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Van Avermaet’s daughter was seen on screen with her father in their attic room as CCC Team’s Belgian rider finished 20 seconds ahead of compatriot Oliver Naesen and Ireland’s Nicolas Roche.

Belgium’s Greg van Avermaet of CCC Team celebrates after winning the virtual Tour of Flanders in a screen grab from Belgian TV channel RTBF.
 Photo: AFP

“It was a funny feeling, you suffered without having the feeling of being in the races,” said Van Avermaet, who was born in the region.

“My girl, who couldn’t understand why her dad was busy racing at home, was very happy for me,” he added.

Australian Michael Matthews failed to finish, while seventh-placed Tim Wellens raced from his balcony in Monaco.

“The effect of the wind was also replicated, the effort was much more difficult for the rider in front than those behind,” Lotto-Soudal’s Wellens said after racing from his home on the Mediterranean coast.

“I had without doubt a better view than Olivier Naesen, who was pedaling in his basement in Belgium,” Wellens added.

Earlier in the day, the race organizer said that it could reschedule the race itself for later in the calendar.

“The goal is to still organize De Ronde later this year. Everyone has agreed on that, but for now it’s just hypothetical discussions because we don’t know when the crisis will end,” Flanders Classics chief executive Tomas van den Spiegel told Flemish TV channel VRT.

Virtual champion Van Avermaet said he hoped it would take place, which would give him a shot at going one better than his two second-placed finishes in 2014 and 2017.

“I hope the real Tour of Flanders can take place in the autumn and I can really win it,” he said.

The race was viewed by more than 21,000 people on YouTube and it was also shown on Belgian TV.

This year’s week-long Tour de Suisse, originally set for early June, has also discussed the idea of holding an online version of the race.

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content_text:
Growers have gone bust, and the black market is still thriving

The lights shone more brightly than anything I’d ever seen. One million blinding watts strafed across the leaves of countless cannabis plants that peeled off in neat rows in every direction. The warehouse was as pristine as a pharmaceutical facility, and as we strode around in crisp white nylon overalls and box-fresh wellies, the atmosphere was surreal — interstellar, almost. It felt as if we were on a mission to Mars. It was definitely a glimpse of the future.

It was 2017 and I had been invited to visit this legal medical cannabis “grow” in the town of Gatineau, near Ottawa. I was in Canada after writing a paper for the drug-law reform think tank Volteface , proposing an online-only, legal cannabis market in the UK as a way to break the logjam between the UK’s two million cannabis smokers and those who fear legalization. I was meeting with Canadian police and politicians to hear more about that country’s plans to completely legalize cannabis the following year.

Back in the UK, a million-watt grow like Gatineau’s would put you in jail for a decade. Here, it was likely to make its owners a very cool, very legal few million in mere months. Added to that, the state would benefit, too, as taxes from sales of the crop would be collected for the common good rather than enriching criminals. It felt utopian.

A worker hangs marijuana plants for the drying and curing process of the bud in April last year.
 Photo: AFP

For the three decades I have campaigned to reform drug laws, I never expected to see change happen so quickly, or at such scale, as it did in Canada. But, two years on, the Canadian experiment hasn’t quite turned out as we reformers had hoped.

The Gatineau greenhouse through which I strode on that day in 2017 was owned by a firm called the Hydropothecary. Now named Hexo, in October last year it shed 200 of its 800 staff. On March 4 one of Canada’s biggest growers, Canopy Growth, announced the closure of two mega-greenhouses in the towns of Delta and Aldegrove — with 500 job losses. The firm also canceled the opening of a new site in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.

HIGHS AND LOWS OF LEGALIZATION

Meanwhile, the black market is still vibrant while cannabis stocks have crashed, medical patients say they can’t get hold of essential medicines, and thousands of jobs have been lost. So what went wrong — and what went right? Were cannabis activists’ hopes of a regulated cannabis market just a pipe dream?

Canada had permitted cannabis for medical use since 2001. Medical patients were allowed to grow four plants, and licensed producers cultivated larger crops for sale online to those with valid prescriptions. But most Canadian cities had illegal — but tolerated — dispensaries where the drug was sold completely indiscriminately.

These stores made Amsterdam’s coffee shops look as prim as a cake stand. The quality and variety of cannabis on sale at these illegal outlets was outstanding, bewildering. Business was not just booming, but blazing. And it was all completely illegal.

Canada’s Cannabis Act of 2018 was a bold attempt to impose some order on this anarchic retail scene. It legalized the sale to adults of 30g of cannabis in austere packaging from government-licensed shops. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau said: “The old approach to cannabis didn’t work. It was too easy for our kids to get it and gangs and drug dealers were reaping the profits. That changes from now on.”

Bill Blair, a former Toronto police chief, became an unlikely cheerleader for legalization, arguing that to do so would “keep cannabis out of the hands of youth, and profits out of the hands of criminals.”

Two other key goals of regulation were the protection of public health and the reduction in criminality associated with the illegal market. After 50 years of the unending, senseless drug war, peace had broken out.

Or so it seemed. Because while Canada may have lit the fuse on an ambitious experiment, every high has a low. Within a year the industry was experiencing mass layoffs, multi-billion-dollar stock-market losses, executive firings and corporate scandals as the overhyped new sector experienced a dramatic and humbling public correction.

What went wrong? Alastair Moore, co-founder of Hanway Associates, a London-based cannabis consultancy, says the Canadian industry has been driven by vulture capitalism and wishful thinking.

“A mix of greed and naivety led this industry to great heights — and has left it on its knees,” Moore says. “While some made lots of money, others lost their investments and now many others have lost their jobs.”

According to Moore’s fellow founder, George McBride: “The key thing is that Canada did actually get the reforms through. In and of itself, that is a huge feat. It’s the first time any major developed country has done so. And so, kudos. However, getting it through has involved a lot of politicians who didn’t understand what they’re talking about designing a really complicated system.”

REGULATING INTOXICATION

So just how does a state create and regulate an entirely new business of intoxication that has always existed, essentially, in a countercultural, outlaw space? Canada, it turns out, did so cautiously, with every decision deliberated over by a centralized government task force .

Added to the complexity of the policy and its implementation, the needle of international capital’s wonky moral compass swung straight at these lucrative new markets. Hundreds of millions of dollars were raised on global capital markets and the Canadian landscape was quickly dotted with massive new grow sites.

The “green rush” had started and production went into overdrive. Stock prices soared and fortunes were staked, made, doubled and tripled in an atmosphere reminiscent of the 90s dotcom boom, or the Yukon gold rush of the 19th century, when 100,000 prospectors headed into the Canadian hinterlands in search of riches. Many firms hoped to corner the Canadian market by throwing millions of dollars of shareholders’ money into massive grow sites. This time, the gold was green. But soon, things started to fall apart.

The main problem Canada’s smokers and growers faced was access: too few retail shops were able to open to serve the eager new market. Canada is a country of 38 million people, divided into 10 provinces that are similar to US states, with provincial governments producing a patchwork of varying regulations. Over a third — 13.5 million — of all Canadians live in the state of Ontario. But as of March 2, Ontario had just 41 retail cannabis stores. The province of Alberta, home to 4.4 million, has 423 stores.

And where there was product available, the price was almost double that of the illegal market. C$5.59 to C$10.23 per gram (US$4 to US$7.25). That was caused by tax burdens and overheads: the legal market has to comply with regulations on fungicide and pesticide residue levels, and draconian security requirements for grow sites, such as huge vaults in which to store the cannabis and record-keeping for every person who enters these vaults.

The illegal market, meanwhile, is completely unregulated — and thriving because of this. Statistics Canada , a state agency, reports that just 29 percent of cannabis users buy all of their product from a legal source. Four in 10 Canadians told the organization that they bought at least some cannabis from illegal sources last year.

‘BAD WEED’

The next problem was that many stores sold poor-quality grass, with smokers complaining that it had been poorly dried and cured, and tasted bad. Modern cannabis users are accustomed to a range of flavors, from lemon to mango, pineapple, strawberry and pine. These flavors are derived from the plant’s natural aroma profile, which skilled growers preserve by careful breeding, correct harvesting and slow, cautious curing of the fragrant flowers.

Many players in the new mass market often skipped these steps in the pursuit of profit, says David Brown, a British Columbia-based cannabis industry analyst.

“Many consumers have had complaints about high prices and what is perceived as lower quality, especially the tendency of many of the legal dried flower products to be overly dried, often from a rushed or improper curing and drying process.”

Why would anyone drive a few miles up the road to score bad weed from many of the government shops when your regular black-market dealer lives nearby, has better product and brings it to your door for half the price?

It’s worth reflecting, also, on the psychology of some of these users.

“For a long time, cannabis has been the mark of the rebel, the outsider, the outlaw,” Brown says. “A lot of the people who complain about ‘bad weed’ and so-called ‘fake legalization’ are doing so because parts of their countercultural identity have been altered forever by this law change. Canada has made cannabis boring — and that was kind of the point.”

With few shops to sell to and customers clinging to their traditional dealers, the new cannabis corporations found themselves holding a glut of product. There is a stockpile of grass weighing in at 400 tonnes, at last count, according to official government inventory figures.

The rollout of retail shops was left, in many cases, to inexperienced officials in provincial government departments, says McBride.

“Ontario authorities said, ‘We don’t trust private organizations to run cannabis shops. We’re going to do it all ourselves.’ Then they tried to do it, but they squandered about $80 million trying to figure out how to do it, and got absolutely nowhere. They had to cancel it and invite private tenders. All these big, shiny grow facilities that cost C$10 million, C$20 million or C$30 million to build, and which all grew loads of cannabis — there was nowhere to sell it, because there weren’t any shops,” he says.

In a stinging irony, medical patients — the very people whose decades of activism had driven the wider reforms, faced cannabis shortages and a steep increase in price after legalization as suppliers diverted their medical product in bulk to the new recreational market rather than in hundreds of smaller deals to medical patients.

Dan Sutton of Tantalus Labs, a British Columbia-based grower that uses natural sunlight and greenhouses, says legalization has been “largely negative” for medical cannabis users because of this new sales dynamic.

“Physicians have been telling medical users they should buy from the recreational marketplace, which is completely inappropriate — and it loads them up with extra taxes and tariffs.”

Sutton originally built his low-impact, sunlit grow to service medical users, and still focuses on this original customer base. But they make up just 10 percent of his sales.

“Many licensed producers now don’t,” he says. “Some have just pulled their financial resources on their medical platforms. If a medical user can’t get their medicine — for people, with, say, multiple sclerosis - that can lead to severe impairment, traffic accidents and potentially death. That blood is on those licensed producers’ hands that stopped serving those users’ needs,” he says.

Paul North, director of communications at Volteface, which commissioned me to write the paper, says Canadian customers’ response to the malfunctioning new markets is understandable.

“You have to provide a superior experience to the illicit market. When it comes to cannabis, this is not easy. Dealers have no marketing restrictions, and can offer a sweet deal and deliver a product to your door.”

TANKING STOCKS

Hype talks, but money walks. The early euphoria in the cannabis stock market has been replaced by a major dose of paranoia. All cannabis stocks have tanked, with an average 50 percent wipeout in value right across Canada and the US in the last year. Major players such as Aurora Cannabis took the biggest hit, with its shares falling from US$12.83 in March last year to US$2 today. Another bud behemoth, Tilray, has also had its share price slashed by 80 percent, from over US$81 to US$16 within a year.

Other cannabis giants including Aphria lost 60 percent of their paper value last year, while Canopy Growth sank by 54 percent. Financing has dried up for the new industry, and small-scale retail investors — often young professionals investing via smartphone apps — have lost large sums of money. None of this is to assert that Canada’s policy has been a failure. If we compare it to the UK cannabis industry, where illegally trafficked children have been found enslaved in abandoned buildings growing cannabis for gangsters, it is better by several orders of magnitude.

Steve Rolles of UK-based drug law reform group Transform agrees that it is harsh to judge the project’s success so soon.

“We are still in the rollout phase. They are still in a transition from an illegal economy to a legally regulated one. It will take some time for new market equilibrium to be established, and for new social norms to emerge, and for teething problems to be addressed.”

How best to create a legal cannabis industry is a question with a particular urgency in the UK today as we build a market for medicinal use — albeit agonizingly slowly. I strongly believe that cannabis will be legalized for adult use in the UK within five years. And it all goes back to that Gatineau greenhouse I visited in 2017.

On that trip, I was accompanied by two Tory party insiders, Blair Gibbs, ex-adviser on police matters to Boris Johnson when he was mayor, and Danny Kruger, son of TV chef Prue Leith, who wrote the “hug a hoodie” speech for David Cameron. Both men experienced something of a

Damascene conversion in their views on cannabis law during that trip.

Days after his return, Kruger wrote in the Spectator: “We do not need to ban everything bad. After all, the Victorians never prohibited alcohol. They regulated it, taxed it and hedged it about with a culture of disapproval. Instead of the prohibition of cannabis we need an old Victorian virtue: temperance.”

Blair Gibbs moved to Canada in 2017 to work as a cannabis consultant, but in August last year he took a job in the PM’s office. Both men are now at the very heart of the British government: Kruger was last year parachuted into the safe Tory seat of Devizes to stand as MP in the last election and is also an adviser to Johnson.

Whether their weed-friendly outlook survives the cold glare of Whitehall orthodoxy remains to be seen. But it is undeniable that the economic libertarians of the Tory party right now are much more pro-cannabis than their newly nationalizing Labor party counterparts. There are, after all, many billions of pounds to be made by the kind of people who fund the Tories: land and property owners and the banks that will finance the new industry.

What happens if you just legalize this drug? It’s a question no one other than Canada has ever really asked. My view is that we have long known that all drug laws are unworkable, illogical, unjustifiable, unscientific, counterproductive and generate countless unintended consequences — in fact, drugs laws often create the exact opposite outcomes to those desired. But ironically, and with a beautifully stoned logic, it turns out that legalizing cannabis in Canada has generated just as many challenges as it solved.

What Canada’s experience demonstrates is that cannabis legalization does not instantly deliver some great social panacea. There is no promised land. But we should never lose sight of this essential truth: Canadians can no longer be jailed for growing and eating and smoking certain flowers. That is a huge, fundamental step forward, no matter what the stock market indices say.

Notwithstanding the market vagaries and the slow shrinking of the illegal market, analyst Andrew Brown is still proud of his country’s bold step into the unknown.

“Legalization in Canada is hardly perfect. After all, we’re less than two years into legalizing a product that has been illegal for nearly a century,” he says. “This is a process, not a destination, and the slow, deliberate approach to a well-regulated industry is allowing Canada to set a responsible path forward that other countries can feel safe in following, even refining and improving upon.”

title: Canada’s cannabis buzz wears off


content_text:
COMPETING AGENDAS:
 Hotels credited their locations and nearby attractions for the surge in patronage, but health authorities urged would-be tourists to cancel plans

Occupancy rates at Taiwan’s resort hotels near popular tourist areas rose substantially over the Tomb Sweeping Day long weekend, prompting health authorities to warn that crowds can compromise the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Crowds packed tourist attractions in Hualien, Nantou, Pingtung and Yilan counties, as well as Tainan, over the four days, boosting occupancy at hotels such as Hotel Royal Chiaohsi (礁溪老爺大酒店) in Yilan, the Grand Cosmos Resort Ruisui (瑞穗天合) in Hualien, Fleur de Chine (日月潭雲品酒店) in Nantou County and Caesar Park Kenting (墾丁凱薩) to at least 80 percent, the hotels said.

The improvement at Hotel Royal Chiaohsi reflected its shifting focus from hot springs to outdoor packages, including hiking tours of Mount Matcha (抹茶山), as people assign more importance to health and wellness, chief executive officer Winston Shen (沈方正) said.

Fleur de Chine said its business has been resilient thanks to its location, with easy and quick access to walking and cycling paths around Sun Moon Lake, while the Grand Cosmos Resort reported nearly full occupancy at its location in a rich tract of greenery and ranches in Hualien’s Ruisui Township (瑞穗).

The warm weather and beaches of Pingtung drew a throng of visitors, benefiting occupancy at Caesar Park Kenting, but drastic cuts to room rates due to overseas travel restrictions also supported high occupancy rates.

However, the crowds raised concern over breaches of social distancing recommendations, prompting health authorities yesterday to advise people to stay home as much as possible for the next two weeks to avoid compromising the fight against COVID-19.

Some companies have asked employees to work from home if they or their family members visited the hot spots.

Lion Travel Service Co (雄獅旅行社) said it has asked employees to work from home if they traveled to the areas or came in contact with people who did, while Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房屋) asked its employees to practice self-quarantine for 12 days if they visited the areas.

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title: Hotel occupancy rates reflect long-weekend crowds

taiwan-subdivisions: 礁溪 瑞穗


title: Central bank can double funds for SMEs, FSC says

people: 顧立雄 楊金龍

content_text:
The central bank has pledged if required to double the amount of money earmarked to support small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to deal with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) said yesterday.

The central bank last month made NT$200 billion (US$6.62 billion) of financing available for banks to help such businesses particularly hit by the effects of the coronavirus, such as those in the tourism and transport sectors, in the form of preferential loans.

Central bank Governor Yang Chin-long (楊金龍) last week said that more money would be made available if that was insufficient, although he did not give details, and said he had personally spoken to banks hoping they could help.

Financial Supervisory Commission Chairman Wellington Koo speaks at a news conference at the Executive Yuan in Taipei yesterday.
 Photo: Peter Lo, Taipei Times

“The central bank promised that it would offer another NT$200 billion if the initial funding was insufficient,” Financial Supervisory Commission Chairman Wellington Koo (顧立雄) said at a news conference in Taipei.

The commission has also offered incentives to banks encouraging them to extend credit to the affected businesses or industries under the government’s financial relief scheme, Koo said.

Banks had received 2,033 applications from the affected businesses for NT$30.43 billion in loans as of Wednesday last week, and they had approved 407 applications for NT$6.17 billion in loans, the commission’s data showed.

The nation has won plaudits for its early and effective disease prevention measures, but its export-reliant economy has wilted, first as much of China was locked down, then as the coronavirus spread through Europe and the US, crushing global demand.

The government last week announced it would spend NT$1.05 trillion on stimulus measures.

The central bank on March 19 cut its full-year GDP growth forecast to 1.92 percent from a December forecast of 2.57 percent, although some banks expect the economy to shrink this year.

Additional reporting by staff writer

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title: Redskins’ Hall of Famer Bobby Mitchell dies at 84

content_text:
Bobby Mitchell, the speedy Hall of Famer who became the Washington Redskins’ first black player, has died. He was 84.

Mitchell split his career between the Cleveland Browns and the Redskins, and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1983.

“The game lost a true legend today,” Hall of Fame president and chief executive David Baker said in a statement on Sunday. “Bobby was an incredible player, a talented executive and a real gentleman to everyone with whom he worked or competed against.”

Bobby Mitchell, right, and Jim Brown are pictured ahead of the NFL Pro Bowl in Los Angeles, California, on Jan. 11, 1964.
 Photo: AP

When Mitchell joined the Redskins in 1962, they became the last NFL team to integrate.

After playing his first four seasons in Cleveland, he spent seven more with Washington and retired with the second-most combined offensive yards.

Mitchell became a Redskins scout and later served as assistant general manager.

“His passion for the game of football was unmatched by anyone I have ever met,” Redskins owner Daniel Snyder said. “Not only was he one of the most influential individuals in franchise history, but he was also one of the greatest men I have ever known. He was a true class act and will be sorely missed.”

Retired NFL running back Brian Mitchell, who has no relation to Bobby, but became friends with him, said he learned from his namesake.

“Tough times don’t remain, tough people do, and you don’t let what you go through change who you are unless it’s for the better,” Brian Mitchell said. “I’m sure there was people saying stuff to him and doing things that [ticked] him off, but he wasn’t bitter. When you look at him when he was working for the Redskins early on, many people felt Bobby should’ve been the general manager of the Washington Redskins. He didn’t get bitter. He kept doing the things he can do.”

Bobby Mitchell in 2015 told 60 Minutes Sports that he understood pretty quickly upon signing for Washington “there was no one in this town used to having a black star.”

Friend and fellow Hall of Famer Jim Brown took it one step further.

“Bobby was an individual that was thrown into the arena of being a victim for no reason,” Brown said. “He had to suffer for being black more than any person I know that played football at the time I played. With that kind of ability, if he were white, everybody on this Earth would know who he was.”

“You look at Bobby, his career was a Hall of Fame career, but I know for African-American people, he was a social activist as well,” Brian Mitchell said. “Not only was he a great football player, and a guy who would go out there and fight for the rights of his people, but he was also a guy who was a philanthropist, a guy doing everything that you’re supposed to do.”

In related news, legendary New Orleans Saints kicker Tom Dempsey, who held the record for the longest field goal in NFL history from 1970 until 2013, has died after contracting COVID-19, the team said on Sunday.

Dempsey, 73, died on Saturday at a care home where he had been battling Alzheimer’s and dementia. Several other residents of the facility where Dempsey was staying have also contracted the coronavirus.

Dempsey’s game-winning 63-yard field goal struck on Nov. 8, 1970, was the most famous moment of his NFL career.

Born without toes on his right foot or fingers on his right hand, Dempsey was an unlikely candidate for a football career, but he flourished with a specially modified, flat-fronted right boot, which critics said gave him an unfair advantage in kicking.

It did not prevent him from spending a decade in the NFL between 1969 and 1979, with stints in New Orleans, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Houston and Buffalo.

His record-setting field goal — which clinched a 19-17 triumph over the Detroit Lions — was the longest in NFL history until Matt Prater converted a 64-yard effort for the Denver Broncos in the thin air of Mile High Stadium in 2013.

“The New Orleans Saints family is deeply saddened and heartbroken at this most difficult time. Tom’s life spoke directly to the power of the human spirit and exemplified his resolute determination to not allow setbacks to impede following his dreams and aspirations,” Saints owner Gayle Benson said in a statement. “He exemplified the same fight and fortitude in recent years as he battled valiantly against illnesses, but never wavered and kept his trademark sense of humor. He holds a special place in the hearts and minds of the Saints family.”

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content_text:
Virus Outbreak: Ex-political prisoners share tips for isolation

From meditation to memory games, former political prisoners in Myanmar are dishing out tips on surviving isolation during a pandemic as the country once severed from the world again closes its borders.

The Southeast Asian state spent nearly half a century under a paranoid, secretive junta that violently suppressed dissent, jailed its critics and locked the country off as it drove the economy into ruin.

Pro-democracy activist Bo Kyi, 56, was one of thousands jailed, spending eight years behind bars in the 1990s. His punishment included 12 months in solitary confinement in a 2.5m by 3.5m cell furnished with just a bowl for a toilet and a mat to sleep on.

Former political prisoner Bo Kyi on Sept. 26, 2007, talks about other prisoners from the 1988 Myanmar uprising at a museum in Mae Sot, Thailand.
 Photo: AFP

Last week he posted advice on Facebook about how to cope with isolation to his compatriots holed up at home, gripped by fears over the coronavirus in a country with a threadbare public health system.

“I wanted to make sure people don’t get too down,” Bo Kyi said.

“Do something! This is the best medicine when you are [in] isolation,” he wrote in the post, signed off “In Solidarity.”

During his detention, Bo Kyi devoted himself to learning English, helped by a friendly guard who each day smuggled in a page from a dictionary.

The prisoner would memorize every word, then eat the page to destroy the evidence.

Accepting his reality and avoiding negative news helped keep him sane, he said, adding he also used to meditate and walk 6,000 steps a day to keep healthy.

Myanmar has reported just 21 cases of COVID-19, including one death, but experts say the low number of people tested for the virus means the real figure is likely many times higher.

There are fears that the country’s health system would be easily overwhelmed when cases rise. Myanmar is thought to have fewer than 200 ventilators for a population of 55 million.

Borders and entry points are firmly shut as the country hunkers down, back in isolation sooner than many imagined possible after the end of outright military rule in 2011.

“We’re heading back to that situation again — and it’s not a happy one,” said analyst Khin Zaw Win, who also spent 11 years incarcerated.

State media have led cheerleading for a national spirit of self-reliance, championing those in self-imposed quarantine as “frontline prevention warriors.”

The upbeat jingle Go Away Corona, blasted from loudspeakers on trucks spraying disinfectant, urges people to wash their hands, eat healthily and stay inside.

“People are the key” is Myanmar’s motto of the moment, repeated in speeches by Burmese State Councilor Aung San Suu Kyi, the nation’s COVID-19 taskforce head.

She remains a heroine for most within Myanmar in spite of her tarnished reputation abroad.

A video of Suu Kyi demonstrating hand washing has clocked up likes online, while her supporters jumped to follow her new Facebook account, opened during the crisis to communicate better with a country addicted to the platform.

She is herself an authority on self-isolation, having languished under house arrest for 15 years in the junta era.

After her release in 2010, she described how she would meditate, listen to the radio and read voraciously.

“There is a very strong resilience embedded in Myanmar society,” Khin Zaw Win said.

He even asked whether older people might weather today’s isolation better than youngsters, saying: “My generation is used to this.”

Other ex-political prisoners contacted by reporters were similarly sanguine about today’s crisis.

They urged people to stay calm, support each other and devote time to neglected hobbies such as gardening or gaming.

Bo Kyi said he navigated the psychological torment of jail by not dwelling on his release date — a lesson for everyone during a pandemic with no immediate end in sight.

“Instead, focus on things in your control,” he said.

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content_text:
The US surgeon general says that Americans should brace for levels of tragedy reminiscent of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, while the nation’s infectious disease chief warned that the new coronavirus might never be completely eradicated from the globe.

Those were some of the most grim assessments yet for the immediate future and beyond, but hours later, US President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence tried to strike more optimistic tones, suggesting that hard weeks ahead could mean beginning to turn a corner.

“We’re starting to see light at the end of the tunnel,” Trump said at a Sunday evening White House briefing.

US President Donald Trump, left, listens as National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci speaks during a coronavirus briefing at the White House in Washington on Sunday.
 Photo: EPA-EFE

Pence added: “We are beginning to see glimmers of progress.”

Trump also insisted that both assessments from his administration — they came within 12 hours of each other — did not represent an about-face or were even “that different.”

“I think we all know that we have to reach a certain point — and that point is going to be a horrific point in terms of death — but it’s also a point at which things are going to start changing,” Trump said. “We’re getting very close to that level right now.”

Earlier on Sunday, US Surgeon General Jerome Adams told CNN: “This is going to be the hardest and the saddest week of most Americans’ lives, quite frankly.”

“This is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it’s not going to be localized,” Adams said. “It’s going to be happening all over the country. And I want America to understand that.”

The number of people infected in the US has exceeded 337,600, with the death toll passing 9,600.

Also on Sunday, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci said the toll in the coming week is “going to be shocking to some, but that’s what is going to happen before it turns around, so just buckle down.”

Fauci said the virus probably would not be wiped out entirely this year, and that unless the world gets it under control, it will “assume a seasonal nature.”

“We need to be prepared that, since it unlikely will be completely eradicated from the planet, that as we get into next season, we may see the beginning of a resurgence,” Fauci said. “That’s the reason why we’re pushing so hard in getting our preparedness much better than it was.”

He also repeated that there is no evidence that hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria and lupus that Trump has been touting as a possible remedy, works against the virus.

“In terms of science, I don’t think we can definitively say it works,” he told CBS’ Face the Nation. “The data are really just at best suggestive. There have been cases that show there may be an effect and there are others to show there’s no effect.”

James Phillips, a professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University Hospital, said Americans could be risking their health if they followed Trump’s advice to take the drug.

“We don’t know enough to make medical recommendations,” he told CNN’s Reliable Sources. “It’s a dangerous message for someone without a medical license to get up there and tell people to try it. You need to listen to physicians, people who understand science, before you go willy-nilly into the medicine cabinet.”

Additional reporting by The Guardian

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title: Virus Outbreak: Trump tempers officials’ grave assessments


content_text:
Counterterrorism police in the UK are investigating far-right groups accused of trying to use the coronavirus crisis to stoke anti-Muslim sentiment.

The monitoring group Tell Mama said that last month it recorded dozens of incidents of far-right groups allegedly trying to put blame on British Muslims for the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

The group said it had had to debunk numerous claims made on social media that Muslims were breaching the lockdown by continuing to attend mosques to pray.

There were also incidents where Muslims were attacked, the group said.

In one tweet from a prominent white nationalist, claims were made that Muslims were breaching the lockdown by congregating outside a mosque in Wembley. Tell Mama debunked this claim, and after it encouraged others users to report the content, Twitter removed the tweet and placed restrictions on the account.

‘SECRET MOSQUE’

A video shared on Telegram by Tommy Robinson, the founder and former leader of the English Defence League, was alleged to show a group of Muslim men leaving a “secret mosque” in Birmingham. The video was watched 10,000 times on the platform. The claims were subsequently dismissed by West Midlands police.

West Yorkshire police similarly dismissed images allegedly showing Muslims attending Friday prayers, pointing out they were taken before the lockdown was announced.

Shropshire police took action after a tweet from a far-right-leaning account maliciously claimed that a mosque was flouting the lockdown. The content was also reported to Twitter.

“These extremists are using coronavirus to get their pervasive message across that somehow the Muslim communities are to blame for the spreading of the virus,” Tell Mama director Iman Atta said.

“It is mainly repeat offenders — individuals who are already known to hold anti-Muslim views — who are repeatedly seeing this as a way to cause community turmoil and tension. It is at times like this when there are pressures in society that some people manipulate this to fuel hate and division across communities,” she said.

High-profile accounts linked to spreading malicious rumors against Muslims have included those of media personality Katie Hopkins and former UK Independence Party leader Gerard Batten.

Hopkins shared a video of police in India assaulting people for congregating at a mosque, tagging in Humberside police.

‘MEN OF PEACE’

“Indian police assisting young ‘men of peace’ to disperse from crowded mosque during lockdown. Something to aspire to hey @Humberbeat?” she wrote

In a tweet that went viral, Batten suggested mosques would remain open as the government would be “too afraid” to close them.

Batten has also promoted conspiracy theories about COVID-19 being a Chinese “bioweapon.”

West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner David Jamieson said that counterterrorism police were looking into reports that rightwing groups were trying to use the pandemic to create division.

“We have become aware that this is being used as an opportunity by right-wing groups to point the blame at some ethnic groups. It does not take a lot for these things to break down and for tensions to arise in these communities. It’s something we are monitoring very closely,” Jamieson said.

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title: UK police investigate anti-Muslim coronavirus claims


title: EDITORIAL CARTOON

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title: World News Quick Take

content_text:
IRELAND

Varadkar to help as medic

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has rejoined the medical register to help the health service during the coronavirus crisis, a government spokesman said on Sunday. Local media reported that Varadkar — who graduated with a medical degree from Dublin’s Trinity University in 2003 — is to work assessing patients over the telephone. “Many of his family and friends are working in the health service,” a spokesman said. “He wanted to help out even in a small way.” The son of a doctor and nurse, Varadkar’s partner and his two sisters are also practicing health workers.

RUSSIA

Case numbers rise by 954

The nation’s COVID-19 case tally has risen to 6,343 in the past 24 hours, a record daily increase of 954, the Crisis Response Center said yesterday. Cases have been recorded widely, but Moscow remains the epicenter of the outbreak with 591 new cases, the center said. Forty-seven people have died across the country, it said.

UNITED KINGDOM

Top Scottish doctor resigns

Scotland’s chief medical officer resigned after flouting guidelines as part of the nation’s lockdown to tackle the coronavirus. Catherine Calderwood on Sunday evening said she would step down following a conversation with Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. Earlier in the day, Calderwood had issued an apology for traveling to her second home outside of Edinburgh. “We have agreed that the justifiable focus on my behavior risks becoming a distraction from the hugely important job that government and the medical profession has to do in getting the country through this coronavirus pandemic,” Calderwood said.

INDONESIA

Big jump in new cases

The government yesterday confirmed 218 new COVID-19 cases, the biggest daily jump since the first cases were announced a month ago, taking the total number of infections to 2,491, Ministry of Health official Achmad Yurianto said. Eleven deaths had been recorded, taking the total to 209, while 192 people had recovered, he said. The report came shortly after Minister of Finance Sri Mulyani Indrawati told lawmakers in Jakarta that as many as 95,000 people in the nation could be infected by next month before the epidemic eases, based on a projection by the nation’s intelligence agency, the University of Indonesia and the Bandung Institute of Technology.

UNITED STATES

Fired captain tests positive

The US naval commander whose widely publicized plea for help for his coronavirus-affected crew led to his dismissal has reportedly himself tested positive for the disease. Captain Brett Crozier’s test result was reported Sunday by the New York Times, which cited two of his former classmates at the US Naval Academy. It said he had begun exhibiting symptoms before leaving the USS Theodore Roosevelt on Thursday in Guam.

MALAYSIA

Brewers’ approval rescinded

The Cabinet yesterday revoked approvals for brewers Heineken and Carlsberg to restart operations during a month-long curb on travel and non-essential business after a backlash in the country that has the highest number of COVID-19 infections in Southeast Asia, with 3,662 cases and 61 deaths. “If producing Heineken is deemed ‘essential services’ then I can think of another 200 services more worthy of that designation,” opposition politician Zaid Ibrahim said on Twitter.

IRAQ

No casualties from attacks

Rockets landed near a site connected with foreign oil firms and state-run companies in the southern city of Basra early yesterday, without causing damage or casualties, oil and police sources said. The rockets, which police said were three Katyusha and were launched at about 3am, hit the Burjesia residential and operations headquarters west of Basra, they said.

BRAZIL

Forest activists under attack

Maranhao State is asking the federal government to send National Guard troops to the Arariboia Indigenous Territory after a string of attacks, including five killings since November, targeting tribesmen known for their fight against illegal deforestation. State authorities said they decided to seek federal help after Antonio Filho Providencia Guajajara, a member of the Guajajara tribe, was shot in the head on Saturday. He was found alive and taken to a nearby hospital. This follows the March 31 murder of Zezico Guajajara, a teacher who had repeatedly denounced illegal logging who was found shot to death on a road near his village.

COLOMBIA

Venezuelans returning home

Hundreds of Venezuelans who fled across the border because of the economic crisis are now returning home, pushed by the novel coronavirus. Migration officials on Sunday said 600 people — including 35 children and 167 women — crossed the main border point at the Simon Bolivar International Bridge in Cucuta one day earlier. Another group of 160 departed Bogota on their way back home on Sunday, officials said. Although the border is officially closed as a measure taken to halt the spread of the virus, the government has opened a “humanitarian corridor” to allow Venezuelans to return home.

CANADA

Actress Shirley Douglas dies

Actress and civil rights activist Shirley Douglas died on Sunday at the age of 86, her son actor Kiefer Sutherland said. Douglas died following a bout of pneumonia, Sutherland wrote on Twitter, specifying that it was not related to the novel coronavirus pandemic. “My mother was an extraordinary woman who led an extraordinary life,” Sutherland wrote. “Sadly she had been battling for her health for quite some time and we, as a family, knew this day was coming.” Douglas spent her acting career between Canada and Hollywood, where she worked with big-name directors such as Stanley Kubrick and David Cronenberg. She is also known for campaigning for several progressive causes, including the civil rights movement and the Black Panthers in the 1960s, and later defending Canada’s public healthcare system.

UNITED STATES

Day auction raises US$3m

An auction of actress Doris Day’s four Golden Globe awards and 1,000 other items from her life generated more than US$3 million over the weekend, far outpacing original estimates, Julien’s Auctions said on Sunday. The top sellers in the live online auction included a 1930 Ford convertible that was seen in the opening of Day’s 1980s talk show Doris Day’s Best Friends, which sold for US$96,000. A Golden Globe award she received in 1962 went for US$25,600. All proceeds from the sale would benefit the Doris Day Animal Foundation. Julien’s Auctions had estimated the sale would bring in between US$300,000 and US$600,000. The auction featured Day’s piano, gowns, furniture and dozens of artifacts reflecting her passion for animals, including numerous ceramic dogs, birds and decorative pigs.

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title: Virus Outbreak: Bangladesh sends food to sex workers

content_text:
EMERGENCY AID:
 Up to 100,000 women could have been left unable to support their families after brothels were closed to help prevent the spread of COVID-19

The government of Bangladesh has started sending emergency food and aid to the tens of thousands of women working in the country’s commercial sex industry as brothels across the country close.

To try to contain the spread of COVID-19, the authorities ordered the lockdown of the sex industry for 15 days, closing the country’s biggest brothel in Goalanda in the Rajbari District of Dhaka until Sunday, along with many others across the country.

The closures leave many of the estimated 100,000 women working in brothels in Bangladesh with no way of supporting themselves or their children.

Several men wearing protective suits yesterday offer prayers for a man who died due to COVID-19, at his funeral in a graveyard in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
 Photo: Reuters

“We don’t earn much here, I make enough to survive day to day and most of us are in debt,” said one 26-year-old woman who has worked in a brothel in Goalanda for more than seven years. “What will happen if things don’t get better? Yesterday I needed to get some food but all my money is stuck in online banking apps and all the cashpoints are closed. I managed to borrow some from a friend, otherwise I would have been in big trouble.”

Local government official Rubayet Hayat, of the sub-district of Goalanda, said food and financial aid from the Bangladeshi Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief would start to be distributed by the end of this week.

“There are some 1,800 sex workers in the brothels under our jurisdiction. We have asked for 30kgs of rice and 2,000 taka [US$24]” for each, he said. “We have got the initial approval and are hoping the funds will be sanctioned by the end of this week.”

Healthcare workers at a charity hospital near to the brothel in Goalanda said more help would be needed to prevent an outbreak of COVID-19 in brothels and red light districts.

“The brothel area is very dirty and unhygienic. The rooms are inhumanly tiny. The house owners built the rooms strategically for more profit so that they can fit more rooms in a small area,” said Zulfekar Ali, a doctor at the Gonoshasthaya Kendra charity hospital. “In that same tiny room, the sex workers live, work and often cook. Many share common toilets.”

“We are using loud hailers to spread awareness in the brothels, telling the women who are there to wash their hands properly,” he said.

Prostitution is legal in Bangladesh and the government estimates that about 100,000 women are working in the sex industry.

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content_text:
After a coronavirus-fueled wave of panic-buying briefly left Hong Kong’s supermarket shelves bare, residents are turning to local producers for fresh food in a territory almost entirely reliant on imports.

COVID-19 has threatened global supply chains as countries impose lockdowns and border restrictions, but for Hong Kong’s dwindling farming community, the pandemic has sparked a sudden boom in business.

The twice-weekly market at Ma Po Po Community Farm in the New Territories town of Fangling has doubled takings since the outbreak became a major public health issue in February.

Mandy Tang, center right, a former interior designer, picks up a locally grown beetroot at Ma Po Po Community Farm in Hong Kong on March 18.
 Photo: AFP

“All of a sudden, so many people came to our fair for vegetables that our supply could not meet the demand,” said founder Becky Au (區晞旻), who gave up her job in the territory’s financial heart a decade ago.

The pandemic has prompted more people to rethink what can be produced in Hong Kong, said Mandy Tang, who runs a campaign group that rallies behind the territory’s farmers by promoting local produce.

“Just like people are starting to manufacture masks and hand sanitizers in Hong Kong, the epidemic is driving everyone to think [about] what can be done with our own hands,” she said.

Hong Kong imports 98 percent of its vegetables, but it was not always so reliant on food from beyond its borders.

Half a century ago, half of the greens consumed in the territory were grown locally, but that steadily dropped with Hong Kong’s rapid economic growth and urbanization in the 1960s and 1970s, and local products were replaced with cheap imports from mainland China.

“The pandemic makes us realize that more buildings are not making a city happier,” said Lau Hoi-lung (劉海龍), an agriculture researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

“Hong Kong must rethink its old habit of relying on shopping around the world and neglecting its own resources in order to become more resilient to [a] global crisis,” Lai said.

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title: Virus Outbreak: Homegrown produce booming in Hong Kong


content_text:
Virus Outbreak: YouTube trying to contain spread of virus-5G rumor

YouTube would reduce the amount of content spreading conspiracy theories about links between 5G technology and COVID-19 that it recommends to users, it has said, as four more attacks were recorded on cellphone masts within 24 hours.

The online video company will actively remove videos that breach its policies, it said.

However, content that is simply conspiratorial about 5G mobile communications networks, without mentioning the coronavirus, is still allowed on the site.

YouTube said those videos might be considered “borderline content” and subjected to suppression, including loss of advertising revenue and being removed from search results on the platform.

“We also have clear policies that prohibit videos promoting medically unsubstantiated methods to prevent the coronavirus in place of seeking medical treatment, and we quickly remove videos violating these policies when flagged to us,” a YouTube spokesperson said. “We have also begun reducing recommendations of borderline content such as conspiracy theories related to 5G and coronavirus, that could misinform users in harmful ways.”

The company’s decision to reduce the visibility of content linked to the false theory came as Vodafone said that two of its own masts in the UK, and two it shares with O2, were targeted.

Three other masts were subjected to arson attacks last week.

“It beggars belief that some people should want to harm the very networks that are providing essential connectivity to the emergency services, the NHS and the rest of the country during this lockdown period,” Vodafone UK chief executive Nick Jeffery said.

British boxer Amir Khan on Sunday became the latest celebrity to share the debunked theory in a series of Instagram videos.

The theory, which has been described as “dangerous nonsense” by Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove, has also been promoted by actor Woody Harrelson and British television star Amanda Holden.

One video, removed by the site after the Guardian flagged it, featured a man claiming to be a former executive at a UK mobile network falsely stating that coronavirus tests were actually used to spread the virus, and that the pandemic was created to hide deaths from the mobile technology, but variations of the video have been available on the site for weeks.

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