■ HEALTH
Vendors receive the ‘OK’
Taipei City’s Health Department yesterday issued an “OK” certificate to 62 food vendors in Taipei’s Shilin Night Market to recognize their efforts in maintaining a sanitary environment and to encourage local and foreign visitors to choose those vendors when visiting the market. The “OK” certification system was established in 2002 by the city government as an incentive to food vendors to improve kitchen hygiene and food quality control. Chiang Yu-mei (姜郁美), director of the department’s food and drug division, said the department focused the certification campaign this month on the food vendors in Shilin Night Market because it was one of the most popular destinations for local and foreign visitors.
■ CRIME
NCC defends station raid
The National Communications Commission (NCC) defended its raid on the Taichung-based radio station Ocean Wire (海洋之聲) this week, saying it was one of the illegal radio stations that the commission had sought to shut down. Armed with a search warrant, officials from the NCC’s Central Region Monitoring Office arrived at the station with the Telecommunications Police at 9am on Tuesday. Employees said the station had encouraged listeners to protest the arrival of Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) last week. The station staged a demonstration outside the NCC’s Central Region Monitoring Office yesterday to protest what it said was the NCC’s infringing upon freedom of speech, its “rough conduct” in confiscating its transmitters and to demand the return of its broadcasting equipment.
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