■ TRAVEL
Fuel surcharge to drop
Starting next Friday, domestic airlines will lower fuel surcharges on short-distance and long-distance international flights, the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) announced yesterday. The administration had just lowered the surcharge last month as fuel prices dropped to US$146 per barrel. The price has dropped further to US$129.86 per barrel this month, the CAA said. The fuel surcharge for short-distance international flights will drop by US$5 to US$25 per person. The fuel surcharge for long-distance international flights, on the other hand, will drop by US$13 to US$65 per person, the CAA said.
■ POLITICS
Justice nominee questioned
The Legislative Yuan began its preliminary review of President Ma Ying-jeou’s
(馬英九) five grand justice nominees yesterday, with two Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators expressing concerns about the qualifications of one of the candidates because of his stand on the sovereignty issue. During a question-and-answer session in the legislature, DPP legislators Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) and Chen Ting-fei (陳亭妃) questioned nominee Chen Shin-min (陳新民), a research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Sun Yat-sen Institute, over a research paper he published in the Journal of the East China University of Politics and Law. The two legislators criticized Chen Shin-min for his paper, which included Taiwan in a discussion of three different autonomy possibilities under a “one nation, two systems” framework. The nominee defended his position, saying that more than half of his original paper had been deleted by editors of the journal and that he was strongly against China’s proposed “one nation, two systems” framework.
■ POLITICS
KMT calls for celebration
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) yesterday invited the public to celebrate the Double Ten national day next Friday by putting national flags in front of houses. KMT Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄) said during the party’s Central Standing Committee meeting that the party would celebrate the national holiday this year enthusiastically, because it marks the first Double Ten National Day after the KMT regained power. “During the past eight years when the Democratic Progressive Party was in power, we weren’t able to celebrate the Double Ten National Day in a grand manner. We will expand the scope of celebrations this year,” Wu said. The committee passed the proposal, which invited all Taiwanese to hang national flags in front of their houses to celebrate the nation’s birthday together.
■ ENVIRONMENT
Ibises flock to Tainan
Conservationists observed a flock of more than 100 sacred ibises on fallow farmland in Tainan County on Tuesday, after residents reported what they thought was a group of black-faced spoonbills. The migratory spoonbills, an endangered species of wading bird, winter at a wild bird conservation wetland in Tainan County every year. Chiu Jen-wu (邱仁武), chairman of the Tainan County Ecology Conservation Society, said the society doubted the report because it was too early for the endangered birds to arrive in Taiwan. The first spoonbills usually arrive from the north between October and November and do not stop in dry fields, Chiu said. They were therefore not surprised to find that the birds sighted were a flock of 126 sacred ibises, although the birds are rarely seen in such numbers in Taiwan.
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