■ BUSINESS
Gou to support 2010 expo
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co chairman Terry Gou (郭台銘) announced yesterday he would sponsor the Taipei City Government’s participation in the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai. The city government’s efforts in establishing Taipei as a wireless city and promoting recycling gained the recognition of the expo committee and it was invited to exhibit the city’s efforts at the event in Shanghai. Announcing the news at a press conference, Gou said his company would donate NT$500 million (US$16 million) to help the city government set up its exhibition. Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌), who will travel to Shanghai today to sign the contract and examine the location, thanked Gou for the gesture.
■ SOCIETY
Men's Crisis Center opens
Kaohsiung City has opened a crisis center for men who have been victims of assaults by their female partners, local radio said on Saturday. The Kaohsiung City Government has opened the Men’s Crisis Center as the number of cases of wives assaulting husbands has risen from 730 in 2006 to 823 last year. This accounted for 12.7 and 13.8 percent of all the family violence cases reported in 2006 and last year respectively, Broadcasting Corp of China reported. The center has opened a hotline for men to report domestic violence and seek help. To avoid embarrassing the callers, social workers who operate the hotline are all men. A staffer from the Kaohsiung Home Violence Center said attacks on husbands had always existed, but people did not often hear of them because many victims feared losing face.
■ POLITICS
Official denies KMT charges
A former national security official has denied charges reportedly made by senior officials in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government that the former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration failed to hand over files related to negotiations between Taiwan and Japan. The Chinese-language United Evening News on Saturday quoted anonymous senior government sources as saying that the National Security Council (NSC) could not find the files because the DPP took them away and did not put them on the handover list. However, Lin Cheng-wei (林成蔚), director of the DPP’s Department of International Affairs and a former NSC advisory commissioner, said that the files were handed over to the KMT administration, which took office on May 20. Lin said that the NSC kept all the files.
■ POLITICS
Chuang cancels fast plan
Former Ministry of Education chief secretary Chuang Kuo-jung (莊國榮) yesterday canceled his plan to stage a hunger strike in front of the Presidential Office starting on July 1. Chuang caused controversy in March when he used profanity while implying that President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) late father had a sexual relationship with his goddaughter. As a result of the remark, National Chengchi University decided on Thursday not to renew his teaching contract, saying that his behavior had disgraced the school. Chuang announced the strike plan on Saturday, saying that he wanted to protest the school’s decision, which he said was in violation of procedural justice and would cause him to lose his teaching qualification. But, a day after Chuang announced his hunger strike, he said he called it off because the Presidential Office was too sensitive a location and would cause unnecessary problems.
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