■ Safety
Speed limits to be changed
Speed limits on freeways will be changed starting April 15. The maximum speed limit on all of the Sun Yat-sen freeway will be 100kph, while the limit on the Second Freeway south of the Tucheng Interchange will be increased to 111kph. Limits on other sections of the freeway vary from 90kph to 100kph. The maximum speed limit for trucks will be 90kph. Speed limits on other freeways will also be changed, according to the National Freeway Bureau. Road sections under construction or those near toll stations will have lower speed limits, according to the bureau.
■ Legislature
Military gets purchase OK
The Legislative Yuan's defense committee gave a final green light yesterday to the purchase of 54 US-made AAV7A1RAM/RS armored assault amphibious full-tracked landing vehicles after the US agreed to a price cut. Under an arsenal renovation project codenamed Flying Horse, the marine corps plans to budget a total of NT$6.16 billion (US$177 million) between this year and 2006 to procure the advanced armored vehicles to upgrade its amphibious combat capabilities. The legislature approved the project at its previous session under a condition that the navy negotiate a 20 percent price discount with the US defense contractor. However, after a difficult series of negotiations, the US contractor only agreed to offer a discount of NT$398 million, below the legislature's 20 percent discount target. The navy then sought the defense committee's consent to strike a final deal with the US contractor.
■ Law
Liu's detention extended
The Taipei District Court yesterday granted prosecutors' request to prolong the detention of China Development Financial Holding Corp (中華開發) chairman Liu Tai-ying (劉泰英) for another two months on charges of corruption and breach of trust. Liu has been detained since Feb. 10 pending an investigation into the Zanadau case -- a land development scandal. The Feb 10th detention was originally set to expire tomorrow. Noting that there are several key potential witnesses yet to report to the court on the case as well as relevant documents that still need to be verified, the court ruled that there is a pressing need to prolong Liu's detention. For his alleged involvement in the Zanadau embezzlement case, Liu was summoned for the first time on Nov. 27 last year.
■ Environment
Water project approved
The Water Resource Agency under the Ministry of Economic Affairs passed a five-year, NT$115.5 billion (US$3.3 billion) water resource project in a review meeting yesterday. The agency said that the project will include seashore and beach protection and plant conservation. Taiwan is surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, the Taiwan Strait, the Bashi Channel and the East China Sea. The project will also include the dredging of major rivers in Taiwan and the betterment of its overall landscape to ensure the safety of the people and their property, as well as the improvement of sewage systems in densely populated urban areas. If the project is passed by the Executive Yuan, it is expected that the government will put in a total cost between 2004 and 2008 to create a Taiwan with beautiful seashores, rivers and regional sewage systems that will take into consideration ecology and combating natural disasters.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the