CULTURE
‘Monga’ in Academy run
Monga (艋舺), the film Taiwan is nominating for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards next year, won the Best Asian Award at the Hawaii International Film Festival on Tuesday. Lee Tai-kuai (李大塊), an official with the Culture Center of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles, accepted the award on behalf of the film’s producers. The gangster movie set in Taipei’s old Wanhua District (萬華) was a local box office success when released in January, setting the single day record for a domestic film, according to the online Business Weekly. It also helped stimulate tourism in that part of the city. The award given at the festival was established by the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema, a pan-Asian film cultural organization involving film production professionals.
SOCIETY
Autistic bikers see Kaohsiung
Six autistic bike riders on a trip around the country arrived in Kaohsiung City yesterday, four days after setting off from Taipei and braving the elements down the west coast. The riders, aged 13 to 30, are being accompanied by family members and volunteers on the third round-the-island cycling journey organized by the Autism Society Taiwan. The group stopped briefly in Kaohsiung City before getting back on their bikes to head for Pingtung, the nation’s southernmost county. “No one has complained about how difficult the trip has been despite the heat and rain,” one of the parents accompanying the riders said.
CULTURE
Dementia film to debut
The nation’s first documentary film depicting life stories of dementia patients will debut late next month, an organization for Alzheimer’s patients announced yesterday. Thanking the public for raising NT$8.2 million (US$256,000) for the film, the Catholic Foundation of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia and Allianz Taiwan Life Insurance Company said the money raised over a five-month period had assisted in the production of The Long Goodbye and would also provide care for elders suffering from dementia. The film, which took nearly three years to complete and was directed by Golden Horse Award winner Yang Li-chou (楊力州), aims to help people understand Alzheimer’s and teach them how to interact with those who suffer from the disease. The groups encouraged the public to raise awareness of the disease, which is growing rapidly among Taiwan’s aging population.
HEALTH
County gives hearing tests
All newborns aged three days to one month with at least one parent registered as a Taipei County resident can get a free hearing test at one of the 12 designated hospitals or clinics located in the county, the county’s Public Health Bureau said yesterday. Foreign nationals can also use the service as long as one of the newborn’s parents can prove residency in the county, bureau officials said. According to the bureau, since Taipei County began offering the service last month, a total of 998 infants were checked and 22 cases of abnormal hearing detected. Studies have shown that one in every 500 newborns will end up needing a hearing aid during their childhood, but if hearing problems are detected within a child’s first six months of life, many infants can eventually restore their hearing to normal levels, the bureau said in explaining the rationale behind the program.
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,