■ Travel
Taiwanese hurt in Hawaii
A car collided with a tour minibus carrying American and Taiwanese tourists on a rain-slick highway leading to the summit of Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii, killing four people and injuring a dozen others, police said. Witnesses told police the car was heading downhill on Wednesday toward Hilo when it went out of control and crossed the centerline of the two-lane Volcano Highway before being broadsided by the oncoming minibus. The dead were Hawaii residents. A dozen passengers from the minibus were treated for minor injuries before being released from Hilo Medical Center. The minibus was making its way up the volcano to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
■ Politics
Hsu fasts over election
Former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairman Hsu Hsin-liang (許信良) has launched a hunger strike to protest the election results. Hsu said he stopped eating Wednesday night over what he claimed was an "unfair" election. Hsu left the DPP in 1999 after his failure to win its nomination for the 2000 presidential election. He ran as an independent candidate in that election. Hsu, believed to be an influential leader of the Hakka, has thrown his weight behind the opposition since his split from the DPP. Hsu was DPP chairman between 1991 and 1993 and again between 1996 and 1998.
■ Politics
Taipei residents petition Yu
The Society for the Concern for the Rights and Interests of Taipei Residents (台北市民權益關懷協會) yesterday sent a petition to Premier Yu Shyi-kun requesting that the government compensate stock investors for their losses and restore order to the daily lives of Taipei residents. The petition said the post-election pan-blue demonstration and Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou's (馬英九) refusal to halt the demonstration were "manmade factors" causing the stock market to fall by 455 points, or over NT$1 trillion, last Monday, resulting in major losses for investors.The petition said the market's fall was the result of officials neglecting their duty, which hurt the interests of the public, and therefore meets the requirements stipulated in Article 2 of the State Compensation Act (國家賠償法). The petition demanded the government compensate investors for their losses. It also demanded that authorities abide by Article 22 of the Constitution and restore the city environment and respect and guarantee the rights and interests of Taipei residents.
■ Labor Affairs
Taipei prints handbook
Taipei City Government's Bureau of Labor Affairs is providing bilingual handbooks to help the more than 20,000 foreign caregivers in the city in taking care of seriously ill patients. Labor officials said that the House Maid Care Handbook is available in three different versions -- Chinese-English, Chinese-Vietnamese and Chinese-Indonesian. There are more than 32,000 foreign laborers in Taipei, of which nearly 80 percent are caregivers, the officials said. The bureau asked the Cheng Shin Rehabilitation Medical Center and its volunteer team to provide information on how to provide basic care, such as extract mucus, clean a body and train to defecate alone. Those interested in obtaining a handbook can go to the Bureau of Foreign Affairs' consultation center for foreign laborers (No. 2, Lane 101, Sec. 2, Xinsheng North Road), or call 2564-3157 or 2564-2546 for more information.
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