CROSS-STRAIT TIES
Reporters freed in China
Two television reporters working for SET-TV have been released after being held by authorities in Beijing yesterday, Government Information Office (GIO) Minister Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) said last night in a statement released by his office. Chiang said that as soon as the Mainland Affairs Council received news of the pair’s detention, it got in touch with the Straits Exchange Foundation, which contacted its Chinese counterpart, the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait and negotiated the release. Saying that Taiwan attaches great importance to press freedom, Chiang expressed regret over the incident, and said he hoped the Beijing authorities would respect journalists’ rights to cover events and avoid similar incidents from happening again. At press time, it was not immediately clear why the pair had been detained.
SOCIETY
Naturalization figures fall
A total of 7,692 foreign nationals became citizens of the Republic of China (ROC) last year, nearly 22 percent fewer than the year before, according to statistics released on Saturday by the Ministry of the Interior. Of the newly naturalized citizens, 96.5 percent are foreign spouses of ROC nationals and 97.78 percent are female, the figures show. More than 99 percent of the new citizens came from Southeast Asia, with three in every four, or 5,887, from Vietnam. The second-largest group were from Indonesia, at 913, followed by the Philippines with 280. The number of cross-border marriages has seen a decline since 2005, when Taiwanese diplomats started on-site interviews with would-be brides of Taiwanese men in order to prevent fake marriages. Meanwhile, 838 people lost their ROC citizenship last year. Of these, 685 gave up their passport voluntarily to obtain citizenship of another country.
TRANSPORTATION
Congestion mars festival
A record number of people visited the Taiwan Lantern Festival in Miaoli on Saturday, but there were complaints about traffic jams and crowd congestion at the venue, the organizers said yesterday. More than 1.54 million people flocked to the event on Saturday, the first day of a three-day holiday that started with warm sunny weather, the Miaoli County government said. This resulted in severe congestion in Jhunan (竹南) and Toufen (頭份) townships, the organizers said. Jhunan Railway Station was packed with people. One family said they had to wait for more than two hours before they managed to get on a train. Organizers said they would ask the railway administration to provide more trains to help alleviate congestion during the last two days of the festival, which ends today.
CULTURE
Taiwan art goes to Europe
The works of Taiwanese artists will reach a wider audience in Europe when an exhibition titled “Arte da Taiwan” opens in an Italian museum next month, organizers said yesterday. The Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, one of the organizers, said works by 14 young artists were chosen to be displayed at the Museo d’ Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce in Genoa, from March 8 to April 24. The Centre Culturel de Taiwan a Paris and the Italian museum are jointly hosting the exhibition. Council of Cultural Affairs Minister Emile Sheng (盛治仁) said the selected pieces will demonstrate the development and trends of new-generation art in Taiwan.
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,