TOURISM
Officials visit Beijing
A delegation of tourism officials from Greater Kaohsiung is set to meet with their Beijing counterparts in China to promote tourism in southern Taiwan, city government officials said yesterday. The delegation, led by Greater Kaohsiung Tourism Bureau Director-General Chen Sheng-shan (陳盛山) arrived in Hong Kong on Tuesday to promote the city and will have discussions with China’s National Tourism Administration in Beijing today on the possibility of increasing the daily number of Chinese tourists allowed to visit the city, the officials said. Bureau officials cited tallies from the National Immigration Agency showing that the number of travelers arriving and departing at Kaohsiung International Airport from January to October last year reached 232,752.
DIPLOMACY
Ma touts passport changes
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said yesterday that a new policy requiring passport applications be filed in person, which is scheduled to be implemented in July, would help reduce passport forgery and boost the nation’s chances of gaining visa-free entry privileges from the US. The drop in the US visa refusal rate for Taiwanese to 2.2 percent last year is also favorable to Taiwan’s bid, Ma told a visiting delegation from Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Ma said that getting included in the US visa-waiver program was one of the government’s goals. The other two are signing an extradition agreement and purchasing F-16 C/D fighters from the US, he said.
EDUCATION
School return date set
The Ministry of Education yesterday said that elementary and junior high schools would start the spring semester on Feb. 14 following the winter break instead of the originally planned Feb. 11. The decision was made on Tuesday at a meeting between ministry officials, local government officials and representatives of parents, teachers and principals’ associations, Vice Minister of Education Chen Yi-hsing (陳益興) said. The change came after parents in northern Taiwan called for postponing the new semester’s first school day to allow children to have an uninterrupted vacation. Feb. 11 is a Friday, which would mean children would have to attend school for just one day, followed by a weekend. The postponement was first agreed to by the New Taipei City (新北市) Government, with Taipei City and Keelung following suit. These moves prompted the ministry to convene the meeting to seek a national consensus.
EVENTS
Flora expo visitors top 3m
Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) and Taipei International Flora Expo organizers yesterday gathered at the expo as the number of visitors to the six-month-long event broke the 3 million mark. The 3 millionth visitor showed up at around noon yesterday, which was about three weeks after the 2 millionth visitor was tallied. The biggest prize was a hotel voucher worth NT$50,000. Hau said the city would offer bigger prizes as the number of visitors to the event continued to grow. In response to concerns about the expo’s failure to attract over 7 million visitors as it was estimated, Ting Hsi-yung (丁錫鏞), general producer of the expo, said the average number of daily visitors to the expo dropped from 40,000 to 20,000 because of cold weather, but added that the expo remained confident of reaching the goal as the event is expected to attract big crowds during the upcoming Lunar New Year holidays.
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