■ CULTURE
Lin Hwai-min honored
Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (雲門舞集) founder and artistic director Lin Hwai-min (林懷民) received the Movimentos lifetime achievement award from the Movimentos Dance Festival in Wolfsburg, Germany, on Tuesday. Volkswagen, along with European arts channel ARTE and German TV station ZDF, sponsors the once every-five-years International Movimentos Dance Festival and Awards. The presentation was made at the Volkswagen Autostadt. The festival jury cited Lin? choreographic achievements in blending modern dance with Chinese cultural traditions and heritage and his expansive knowledge of Asian and European culture. In accepting the award, Lin thanked the people of Taiwan for their support for his company over the past three decades and all those who made donations to the troupe after its home studio in Bali, Taipei County, was destroyed in a fire in February last year. He said he would use the 20,000 euro (US$27,000) prize money to help build the company? new dance center in Tamsui.
■ Politics
CCW panelists questioned
Seven people on the Citizen Congress Watch's (CCW) review panel were summoned by the Taipei District Court yesterday for questioning regarding a slander lawsuit filed by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Tsai Chin-lung (蔡錦隆). CCW released its first evaluation of lawmakers in August last year, in which more than 100 students, journalists, academics and representatives from civic groups assigned scores to lawmakers by reviewing their attendance, number of legislative proposals and conduct. Tsai filed a slander lawsuit against CCW executive director Ho Tsung-hsun (何宗勳) and CCW chairman Ku Chung-hwa (顧忠華) after he was ranked last among legislators in the Internal Administration Committee. Tsai accused the CCW of bias and said the evaluation process was not transparent. On Feb. 4, prosecutors summoned Ho after Tsai accused him of slander. Since then, a total of 14 people on the review panel have been summoned for questioning as prosecutors work to determine whether the CCW ranked Tsai with the intention of harming his reputation. Ho condemned the lawsuit, saying: ?lected officials should be supervised by the people and be willing to face public scrutiny.?br />
STAFF WRITER
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
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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