■ Transportation
Bright headlights targeted
Efforts are being made to work out a set of safety standards and examination criteria for the installation of high intensity discharge (HID) lamps on automobiles, officials of the highways affairs department of the Ministry of Transportation and Communication said yesterday. By July 1, traffic safety regulations will be established allowing the police to clamp down on drivers who have their cars upgraded with HID headlights without following a standard installation procedure, the officials said. HID headlights can blind drivers coming in the opposition direction if not installed properly.
■ Society
Birth rate falls
Taiwan's gross reproduction rate declined to 7.4 live births per 1,000 population in the first 10 months of this year, down from 7.8 for the same period last year, the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said. The gross reproduction rate refers to the ratio of births per 1,000 population during a specific period of time, usually a year. With the birth rate continuously falling, the DGBAS said the number of newborns dropped to 169,000 during the January-October period, marking a 3.8 percent year-on-year decrease. Of the newborns, 6,832 were born to unmarried mothers for a 6.2 percent year-on-year rise, according to DGBAS tallies. In the face of the falling birth rate, the Executive Yuan has formed a special task force to draft revisions to the nation's population policy guidelines and come up with a population policy white paper.
■ Health
More women getting HIV
The number of female HIV carriers has been rising alarmingly and the age of this group has also been getting younger and younger, officials from the Department of Health reported. As of the end of last month, 803 females were confirmed HIV positive, constituting 8.4 percent of the total number of 9,616 people who have been confirmed HIV positive since the first case was reported in 1985, officials from the Center for Disease Control said. Of the 803 female HIV carriers, nearly 70 percent were aged between 20 and 39. According to the center's tallies, the age of female HIV carriers averaged 30 this year, down from 38 in 2003. Among this year's 2,766 new cases, 332 were women. Of these, 29 were under 20 years old, including three as young as 16, according to officials. About half of these teenage girls said they had become infected via using drugs. The rising number of female HIV carriers has also contributed to changes in the stereotype of HIV carriers, who were formerly mostly male drug users and homosexuals.
■ Diplomacy
Envoy submits resignation
Deputy representative to the US Joanne Chang (裘兆琳) has reportedly submitted her resignation to President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), a Chinese-language newspaper reported yesterday. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday refused to comment on the report. Chang, deputy representative of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Washington, reportedly quit her job because she felt neglected and found it difficult to implement her ideas. Chang was also alleged to have "tensions" with her boss, David Lee (李大維), the report said. Ministry officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said yesterday that they had heard Chang wanted to quit a while ago, probably because of the gap between her expectations and the reality of the job.
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,