■CULTURE
Hakka video contest held
The Council for Hakka Affairs is inviting people to take part in this year’s creative Hakka music video competition. First held in 2005, the annual contest aims to promote Hakka pop culture and connect the younger generation with Hakka culture, event spokesman and Hakka actor Chang Shan-wei (張善為) said at a press conference in Taipei yesterday. The theme for this year’s contest is Hakka children’s songs. Contestants are to create music videos for songs announced on the event’s Web site. All works will be judged for creativity, elements of Hakka culture and visual effect. The winner will be awarded a NT$300,000 cash prize. For more information, visit www.hakkamv.com.tw.
■AGRICULTURE
Pig farmers ‘stealing’ scraps
The price of kitchen leftovers, which hog farms use to feed their stock, has risen to a point where some farmers are “stealing” it, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official said yesterday. As food prices skyrocket in the international market because of poor harvests caused by bad weather, the price of kitchen scraps is now NT$1,000 per tonne compared with NT$300 to NT$600 last year, Lin Mao-yuan (林茂原) of the EPA’s Environmental Police Unit said. In some cities and counties, the price could reach NT$2,000 or more, he said. The EPA collects about 1,900 tonnes of leftovers per day, and last year the total volume collected was some 663,000 tonnes, which was used as hog feed. With the price of leftover food on the rise, thefts have been reported in Taichung and Hsinchu counties, where pig farmers have been observed “cleaning up” slop collected by EPA personnel for shipment to recycling companies, Lin said.
■HEALTH
Betel nut addicts kick habit
A campaign in Hualien County to help betel nut addicts kick the habit has succeeded in guiding 145 people out of a total of 276 who took part in the program to quit, the county’s health bureau said yesterday. As of the end of last month, 145 addicts had given up betel nuts entirely since the campaign’s launch in July last year, bureau officials said. The remaining 131 betel nut chewers in the program now consume an average of 4.61 nuts per day, from 41.08 in the past, the officials said. A study conducted by the bureau from 2003 to 2006 showed 35,823 county residents chewed the addictive nuts, with their daily consumption averaging 16.8 nuts. The county’s annual consumption of betel nuts is estimated at 216 million nuts.
■DIPLOMACY
Taipei group visits Shanghai
Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) yesterday led a delegation of Taipei City government officials on a five-day visit to Shanghai. Hau, the nation’s first elected municipal chief to visit China, is visiting Shanghai to witness the signing of an agreement to confirm Taipei’s participation in World Expo Shanghai 2010, scheduled for May 1 to Oct. 31, 2010. He is scheduled to meet Shanghai Mayor Han Zheng (韓正) on Thursday to witness the signing of the agreement. Hau will visit the Shanghai Wild Animal Park, where he hopes to gain a better understanding of how Shanghai zoo authorities take care of pandas. Hau will also visit a project aimed at developing Shanghai’s Hongqiao Airport into a multiple transportation hub. He will also meet Taiwanese business leaders to encourage them to repatriate some of their overseas investment and to locate their R&D centers and business headquarters in Taipei.
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