■TOURISM
Lawmaker on Japanese TV
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞) yesterday said he would appear in a series of programs on Japanese TV later this month to promote Taiwanese tourist attractions in line with government efforts to lure more Japanese tourists and boost exchanges between the two countries. Lee said the travel program, which showcases buildings erected during Japan’s colonial rule of Taiwan, would premiere on Oct. 29 on Japan’s TBS. In the series, Lee and a female Japanese host visit Jingtong Train Station and the Prince Guest House in Pingsi (平溪), Taipei County. “It was not difficult to co-host the programs in Japanese. Rather, it was the post production work that was really long and tiring,” said Lee, who holds a doctorate in architecture from a Japanese university and has a good command of Japanese.
■SOCIETY
AIT, TFCC plan Pearl day
The American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) and the Taiwan Foreign Correspondents Club (TFCC) are organizing a series of events in the middle of this month to commemorate US reporter Daniel Pearl, who was killed in Pakistan in 2002. Pearl was the South Asia Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal. Pearl was abducted in Pakistan in 2002 while retracing the steps of “shoe bomber” Richard Reid. Several weeks later, his beheading was confirmed. “After his tragic death, Pearl’s musician friends came together to launch the first Daniel Pearl World Music Day in 2002, and this has since sparked a series of worldwide concerts every October to spread a message of hope and humanity,” TFCC said in a newsletter. Todd Mack, founder of Friends of Daniel Pearl Festival (FODfest), will visit Taiwan later this month with five US musicians to stage free performances in Taipei, Taichung, Tainan and Taitung, in FODfest’s first international appearance, AIT said.
■HEALTH
Telecare seminar planned
The British Trade and Cultural Office (BTCO) and Taiwan’s Department of Health (DOH) will jointly hold an international seminar in Taipei this week to share their experience in the field of telecare. The seminar, titled “The APEC Workshop for Innovation in Telecare,” will bring together experts on telecare from Taiwan, the UK, Australia and the US on Wednesday and Thursday, a BTCO newsletter said. “The purpose of the workshop is to help foster an in-depth understanding of current developments and future trends in the promotion of telecare worldwide,” DOH said on its Web site. “We also aim to achieve consensus among care providers, system developers and service managers on the use and development of telecare service, and to encourage the different sectors to work toward expansion.”
■SOCIETY
Premier denies rumors
Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) yesterday denied that the government planned to arrange for Wang Chung-yu (王鍾渝), former president of China Steel Corp (CSC,中鋼), to succeed Nita Ing (殷琪) as head of Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp (THSRC, 台灣高鐵). Local media reported yesterday that Wang had been told he would be named as an independent member of THRSC’s boards of directors and replace Ou Chin-der (歐晉德), its acting chairman, to restructure the debt-ridden company. Approached by reporters when inspecting a post-typhoon road-repair project in Nantou County, Wu yesterday said the report was “groundless.”
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
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
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,