■ SOCIETY
DGBAS to conduct census
The Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) will conduct a decennial population and housing census from Dec. 26 to Jan. 22. The census will be carried out based on registration data and sample surveys, with 1.3 million households and 4.5 million people polled, the agency said. The DGBAS is responsible for conducting the census every 10 years. The census for this year and next year will be the sixth population and housing census since the Republic of China government moved to Taiwan in 1949, the agency said. Censuses were conducted in 1956, 1966, 1980, 1990 and 2000. All local governments will set up task forces next month to visit households during the census period. An estimated 17,000 people are expected to take part in the work. About 80 percent of the world’s countries plan to conduct censuses by the end of this year, which are expected to cover 90 percent of the world’s population, the DGBAS said.
■ CRIME
Former chief sentenced
A former military intelligence chief has been sentenced to 14 years in prison on corruption charges, the Ministry of National Defense said yesterday. Lieutenant General Ke Guang-ming (葛廣明) was convicted on Tuesday by a military court of embezzling NT$3.7 million (US$115,000) in 2008 while he was head of the military intelligence bureau, the ministry said. His secretary was sentenced to two years and six months in prison for assisting him in the crime, it said in a statement. A court last year sentenced a retired lieutenant general to more than 10 years in jail on charges of bribery, blackmail and leaking secrets in one of the nation’s worst military scandals.
■ ENERGY
Penghu invests in turbines
Penghu County plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to expand its wind power capacities, an official said yesterday. The county government has set aside more than NT$10 billion for wind turbines and other hardware, the development bureau official told reporters, adding that it would set up an energy company next year to boost wind power output to 125 megawatts by 2020 from the current 10 megawatts. Several foreign and local companies, including Germany-based Enercon, the world’s third-largest wind turbine maker, have expressed an interest in the project, said the official, who declined to be named. Wind power currently supplies 20 percent of the energy needs in Penghu, the official said. The new company could transmit electricity to Taiwan proper when an undersea cable connecting Penghu with Yunlin County is finished in 2014, he said.
■ SOCIETY
APEC forum meets in Taipei
The first APEC food security forum opened in Taipei yesterday in the hopes of developing an action plan by the end of the three-day meeting, Taiwanese agriculture officials said. The forum will launch a discussion on establishing a regional food security mechanism, a pressing issue in light of climate change, Council of Agriculture Minister Chen Wu-hsiung (陳武雄) said. The council organized the forum. The initiative was submitted by Taiwan in the APEC Agricultural Technical Cooperation Working Group last year, Chen said. The council said 95 delegates from 20 economies are attending the forum.
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,