■ Crime
Bomb found in phone booth
A home-made bomb was found in a public telephone booth in Taipei yesterday with an attached note saying the government should ban rice imports. Police cordoned off the telephone booth on Chunghsiao E Road and removed the bomb, which was powerful enough to kill a person if detonated, officials said. A similar bomb and note were discovered on Nov. 13 at a public toilet in Ta-An Forest Park in Taipei. The note said that rice imports should be banned, and that the government should take care of the people.
■ Fraud
Gang arrested in China
Police in China's Fujian province have broken up a criminal gang that placed phone calls to people in Taiwan defrauding them of large amounts of money, state media said yesterday. In a major operation, police officers in Xiamen swept several locations suspected of housing gang members, detaining 73, including 56 Taiwanese nationals, the Beijing Morning Post reported. The gang made money by calling up Taiwanese people at random, telling them they had earned a tax rebate and asking them for their ID card and bank account details, the paper said. They then used the information to arrange transfers to bank accounts controlled by themselves, or to make counterfeit bank cards.
■ Diplomacy
Delegation heads for Belize
Foreign Affairs Minister Eugene Chien (簡又新) yesterday departed for Belize at the head of a delegation that will attend a conference with Taiwan's diplomatic allies in Central America. A statement issued by Chien's office said he will meet with the foreign ministers of Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama at the 11th Conference of Foreign Ministers under the auspices of the Mixed Commission on Cooperation between Taiwan and Central American Countries, which is set for Nov. 25 in Belize City. Chien will also visit Prime Minister Said Musa of Belize before returning on Nov. 29.
■ Cross-strait links
S Korea possible third point
South Korea could also serve as a stopover point for cross-strait charter flights during the Chinese New Year holidays, Premier Yu Shyi-kun said yesterday. Okinawa and South Korea are being considered as stopover points. The charter flight model was first adopted this year to facilitate the return of Taiwanese businesspeople based in China and their dependants for the annual festival. According to a preliminary evaluation the proposed cross-strait flights will be operated between Jan. 9 and Feb. 1 next year.
■ Culture
Club temporarily closed
Club V1492, a traveling and reading group sponsored by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), has temporarily closed due to the expiration of its lease at its current location, the first floor of the DPP's headquarters on Peiping E Road. The club will be moved to the former location of the Four Seasons restaurant in Jenai Road, Sec 4, and is to resume operations in early January next year. The current site of the club will be turned into a temporary photo exhibition hall sponsored by the DPP's Department of Information and Culture. The club yesterday held a party to mark the temporary closure. Hundreds of club members joined President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) at the party. The club gets its name from the year 1492, when Columbus discovered the New World.
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,