■ Crime
Confession deemed a fake
Tainan prosecutors decided yesterday that Wang Er-chiang (王而將) was not involved in the March 19 assassination attempt on the president and vice president. Wang, an illegal Chinese immigrant, was arrested on Oct. 21 for his involvement in another murder case. He told prosecutors on Oct. 29 that he had fired the shots on March 19 because their campaign parade had interrupted his nap in a park. However, prosecutors discovered that Wang was likely making up his story because he could not identify many pieces of crucial evidence and he could not identify the location of the incident.
■ Judiciary
Ex-prosecutor impeached
Former Tainan prosecutor Sung Tsung-yi (宋宗儀) was impeached by the Control Yuan yesterday because he allegedly accepted bribes and damaged the image and reputation of prosecutors by going to hostess clubs. The Ministry of Justice fired Sung on April 29 after its Internal Affairs Depart-ment alleged that Sung had accepted NT$11.5 million (US$3.4 million) in bribes from defendants, including those indicted for murder and illegal gambling. Sung allegedly released the people who had paid him on bail. He reportedly ran some illegal casinos as a sideline and often went to hostess night clubs. Officials said prose-cutors in the Internal Affairs Department had photographs of him at such clubs.
■ Crime
Heroin found in cabinets
Coast Guard Administration officials yesterday discovered 2.5kg of pure-grade heroin in a cargo container delivered from China and arrested one suspect. The heroin was hidden inside several wooden cabinets in a container full of wooden furniture at a terminal in Kaohsiung, a coast guard official said. Investigations showed that the drug originated in China, the official said. The suspect was identified only by his family name of Yao.
■ Education
Qualification ceremony set
The London Chamber of Commerce and Industry Examinations Board will hold a joint qualifications conferring ceremony in Taipei today for training programs provided at 10 of its affiliates around the country, officials said yesterday. The institutions that will take part in the ceremony include the Portal of University Resources under the National Taiwan University Innovation Incubation Center, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Feng Chia University, Aletheia Uni-versity, Lunghwa University of Science and Tech-nology, Shu-Te University, Overseas Chinese Institute of Technology and Yu Da High School of Commerce and Home Economics. The ceremony will be hosted by Sean Leslie, the board's representative in Asia. The board, which was established in 1887, is a leading global provider of vocational, business-related qualifications.It has more than 8,000 training centers and 5,000 qualification-examination centers in 125 countries, and there are over 80,000 people taking part in board-hosted exams every year. The board established its first representative office in Taiwan in July and has since provided a wide range of programs at its affiliates in the fields of marketing, customer service, secretarial and administra-tion as well as business English.
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,