■ Environment
No botulism in birds' turf
Tests in the nation's major habitat for the black-faced spoonbill have found no evidence of botulism contamination, the Tainan County Animal Disease Control Center reported yesterday. Center officials said the first test was completed last month, with officials checking 18 sites; a second test will be conducted this month and samples will be taken until early next year. They made the remarks as the first group of the rare birds arrived at the Chiku Wetlands Sanctuary near the estuary of the Tsengwen River in Tainan County to spend the winter. Between Dec. 2002 and January last year, cases of black-faced spoonbills infected with botulism were reported and 73 died, the first time the rare birds had died en masse in Taiwan.
■ Foreign Affairs
Paraguay gets big grant
The nation donated US$2 million to Paraguay Friday to help its sole diplomatic ally in South America boost its exports. Victor Varela Allegretti, a Paraguayan Industry and Commerce Department (ICD) official in charge of export affairs, said the donation will be subject to transparent management. According to Varela, US$1.6 million of the donation will be used to revitalize Paraguay's sagging exports and economic development while the remaining US$400,000 will finance a project to improve the ICD's information system.
■ Society
Workaholics risk marriages
Sixty-six percent of white-collar workers who want to get married have problems finding a partner mainly because of long work hours, according to the results of a survey released yesterday. The survey conducted by the 9999 Pan Asia Job Bank, an online job search Web site, shows that 52.31 percent of white-collar workers have a desire for marriage, compared with 26.08 percent who said they are not the marrying kind and 21.61 percent who have little interest in marriage. On the reasons not to get married, 43.52 percent of the respondents said they do not want the bondage of wedlock, 22.77 percent believe marriage is the burial of life, 18.49 percent think marriage will subject them to too much legal responsibility, and 12.95 percent said they have not found the motivation to get married.
■ Arts
Troupe to perform in Seoul
A folk acrobatic troupe from Taichung County will perform folk drumming in the upcoming Seoul Drum Festival by invitation of the Taiwan representative group of the International Organization of Folk Arts (IOFA). The Jyou-Tian Folk Drum and Arts Group (九天民俗技藝團) will participate in the three-day festival that opens Oct. 8. Since 2000, many different drum troupes from around the world, performing in modern or traditional styles, have been invited to join the annual event to introduce their native music and culture to local people. The festival is sponsored by the Seoul City Government. This year, a total of 12 groups from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Ghana, India, Japan, Sweden, Taiwan and the US, as well as the host country South Korea, will perform. The Jyou-Tian troupe was founded in 1995 by drum performer Shue Chen-rong (許振榮). Shue assembled a team of energetic young people -- including some school dropouts -- to play drums, do acrobatics and perform traditional dances for local temple activities. Jyou-Tian members have been dedicated to performing Taiwan's traditional folk drumming. Their ideas and efforts made them a "distinguished performing group of Taichung County" in 2002 and since then.
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,