■ Health
Group helps quake victims
The Taiwan International Health Action (Taiwan IHA) group has dispatched a medical mission to Indonesia to help those affected by a magnitude-6.3 earthquake that rocked the country's Batusangkar District on Tuesday, leaving up to 100 dead and hundreds injured, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday. The spokesman said that the group, an ad hoc interagency body established by the Executive Yuan's Department of Health and the ministry, has sent a four-member medical team to the earthquake-affected area in West Sumatra Province to assist in disaster relief. The spokesman said the Taiwan IHA began operations in March last year to provide international humanitarian medical aid and promote medical cooperation. The group has helped international relief and disease prevention efforts on many occasions, he added.
■ Earthquakes
Moderate quake strikes
A moderate earthquake struck off northeastern Taiwan on Thursday night, meteorologists said. No damage, injuries or tsunami warning was immediately reported. The magnitude 5.2 quake hit at around 11:30pm local time and was centered at sea about 6km southeast of the coastal city of Suao, the Central Weather Bureau said in a news release. Suao is about 150km southeast of Taipei. The earthquake was felt in northern and central parts of Taiwan, the bureau said.
■ Crime
Fraud ring busted
Police recently raided a criminal ring in Taichung, arresting nine people suspected of obtaining money by fraud, mostly from people living in China, the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) said yesterday. The criminal organization, which specialized in fraud, was headed by a woman surnamed Hsieh (謝) who, together with her accomplices, employed a "phishing" scheme aimed at Chinese citizens living in inland regions, as well as major cities including Beijing and Tianjin, the CIB said. Based in Taichung, the suspects made a massive number of telephone calls through Internet phone systems to mobile phone users in China. Masquerading as bank staffers or police inspectors investigating credit card fraud, the suspects lured their victims into remitting money to a dummy bank account via ATMs. The fraud ring had made more than 1 million phone calls since last July and succeeded in defrauding their victims of about NT$100 million (US$3 million). The swindlers had also "laundered" the money by wiring it back to Taiwan via an underground remittance system, the CIB said. The suspects have been sent to the Taipei District Prosecutors' Office on charges of fraud.
■ Science
Stem-cell advances reported
A team of scientists working at the gynecology department of the National Taiwan University (NTU) has successfully produced ovarian follicles from human embryonic stem cells. The scientists said that this represented a major advancement in stem-cell research and could be a major breakthrough in the treatment of infertility. The research team added that it could also help advance future research in the field if functional egg cells could be successfully grown from the ovarian follicles. The NTU team's paper detailing its research made the cover story of last month's issue of the science journal Human Reproduction.
■ Trade
Chen lauds orchid show
President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) yesterday expressed hope that the annual Taiwan International Orchid Show (TIOS) would become a platform for sales of Taiwan-grown orchids to other countries around the world. Chen spoke of his expectations during a visit to the 2007 orchid exhibition held at the Taiwan Orchid Plantation, a biotech park in Tainan County as part of the local government's drive to promote technological research and development in orchid cultivation. Chen visited the TIOS hours before its formal opening. Speaking to reporters at the event, Chen said he was very excited to know that the number of foreign visitors to the exhibition had been doubling year on year since its debut in 2005. The boom is believed to be the best encouragement to local orchid growers and related businesses, Chen said.
■ Politics
No name-change date set
No timetable has been set for renaming the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall because certain administrative procedures have yet to be completed, an official with the Ministry of Education (MOE) said yesterday. Chu Nan-hsien (朱楠賢), director-general of the Department of Social Education, made the remarks after the MOE and several other government agencies adopted a resolution the day before to degrade the memorial hall from a third-level administrative unit to the fourth level. For any third-level administrative unit under the Executive Yuan, a set of "organic statutes" must be drafted and submitted to the Legislative Yuan for approval, while the establishment of a fourth-level unit is based upon "organizational rules," Chu explained.
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,