■ Travel
Shanghai transfers coming
China Airlines (CAL) said yesterday that it is working with China's China Eastern Airlines to inaugurate a new Taipei-Okinawa-Shanghai transfer service. Total travel time on the new service, set to begin Saturday, is four hours and 30 minutes, the fastest service from Taiwan to Shanghai, CAL said. The airline said three round-trip same-day connecting flights per week will be offered, on Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Daily service will begin Oct. 26.
■ Kaohsiung
Hsieh wants Love boats
Kaohsiung Mayor Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) has asked the city's transportation bureau to get the Love River in shape so that the public can go rowing on the river by next January. Hsieh, who visited San Antonio, Texas a few months ago to study how that city's "River Walk" was developed into a famous tourist attraction, said the Love River would be developed into a scenic spot to help promote tourism in the city. Hsieh said that by the end of January the river will become a top recreation area with people able to sit on the riverbanks, drinking coffee and listening to music.
■ Environment
US renews protection pact
The US and Taiwan yesterday renewed a bilateral agreement on technical cooperation for environmental protection. Representatives of the two countries signed a document in Taipei to renew the agreement for five years. The signing ceremony was witnessed by officials of the American Institute in Taiwan, the Environmental Protection Administration of the Executive Yuan, and other government organizations. Originally signed on June, 21, 1993, the agreement has been renewed twice. The two countries have signed, so far this year, seven agreements for the promotion of technological exchanges, an official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
■ Crime
It takes a thief...
A Chiayi man who was unable to pay back the money he owed a loan shark robbed a bank yesterday with the intention of being caught and taken to jail, police said. Wearing a motorcycle helmet and pointing a gun, the 45-year-old man, Chiang Tu-cheng (姜篤進), ordered clerks to hand over NT$230,000 in cash at a bank in Chiayi County. "Instead of running away with the money, he sat at the desk of the bank's assistant manager waiting for police to come," a police officer in Chiayi said by phone. Chiang did not make any attempt to resist police arrest, the officer said, adding Chiang later confessed that he robbed the bank in order to avoid the loan shark. Bank robbery is subject to a 10-year jail term. Chiang owed the loan shark just over NT$60,000, the officer said.
■ Cross-strait ties
Resume contact, Koo urges
Koo Chen-fu (辜振甫), chairman of the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), yesterday urged the resumption of long-stalled cross-strait contact and communication to help solve problems resulting from bilateral exchanges. Koo made the remarks when he addressed a board meeting of directors and supervisors of the foundation. He said that though the political stance on both sides of the Taiwan Strait is starkly different, close unofficial exchanges have been going on for some time, and that the SEF and its mainland counterpart, the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, should not exclude themselves from this trend.
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
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
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,