■ Culture
Music archive to open
The National Music Archive (民族音樂資料館) will open to the public tomorrow, the National Center of Tradi-tional Arts announced yesterday. The archive is an information library providing resources on Taiwan's ethnic music. Center director Ko Chi-liang (柯基良) said the archive, located on Hang-zhou North Road, will benefit people who are interested in the research of ethnic music. All the materials and collections in the archive are in digital or electronic files, Ko said. He said the archive's music, library and news clips can be accessed via the Internet.
■ Cross-strait ties
No comprome for culture
Cultural exchanges with China should adhere to three criteria -- dignity, recipro-city and safety -- Huang Chieh-cheng (黃介正), vice chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council said in Keelung yesterday. Speaking at a workshop on academic exchanges with China, Huang said cross-strait cultural exchanges are the least controversial and most stable form of exchanges. The only principle regarding them is that they should not compromise the dignity and safety of the country. He cautioned the workshop participants to be on their guard against Beijing's attempts to deny Taiwan's statehood. He also urged colleges and universities to ensure that visitors from China are not trying to sneak into the country to sightsee or work.
■ Trade
Products shown in Istanbul
Some 20 Taiwanese manu-facturers displayed their products at an exhibition in Istanbul, Turkey yesterday. An official of the China External Trade Development Council said the Taiwanese exhibited their products in Kazakhstan before arriving in Istanbul and will head for Moscow and St. Petersburg later this week. On display were computers and peri-pherals, medical equipment, auto parts, sports goods, and catalogues of products from more than 600 other com-panies. The council official said trade between Taiwan and Turkey increased signi-ficantly in recent years. Exports amounted to US$302 million in the first seven months of this year, an increase of 38 percent over the same period last year. Exports to Turkey jumped 83.4 percent last year, he said.
■ Diplomacy
California mission to visit
A 20-member mission from the California is scheduled to arrive in Taipei on Saturday for a five-day visit. Members of the mission will include lawmakers, local govern-ment officials and business leaders. They will be led by Jim Brulte, minority leader of the Californian Senate. They will meet with govern-ment and business leaders in Taipei and also visit the Hsinchu Science-based Industrial Park and the National Palace Museum before leaving for Macau and Hong Kong on Nov. 6, according to a news release from the US Commerce Department.
■ Diplomacy
APEC meet bears fruit
Taiwan held bilateral talks with 10 states and has improved bilateral ties with at least 15 states on the fringes of a ministerial conference of the APEC forum in Bangkok, an economics official said yesterday. In a briefing to the legislature, Huang Chih-peng, director-general of the Foreign Trade Bureau, said that Taiwan's delegation made good use of its presence at the forum by associating with as many delegations from other member states as possible.
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,