ART
Museum to host Ai show
The Taipei Fine Arts Museum is due to stage an exhibition of the work of Ai Weiwei (艾未未), officials said yesterday. Ai Weiwei Absent will open on Saturday, featuring installation pieces, photography, sculpture and videos by the artist. “It’s a pity that Ai himself cannot come to Taipei, but his wife is expected to see the show in the first half of November,” the Taipei City Government said. Ai, who is one of the most outspoken critics of Chinese Communist Party controls and censorship in China, is being investigated for tax evasion and has been ordered not to leave Beijing.
TRANSPORTATION
Students get THSR discount
Starting today and lasting until Dec. 29, college students are eligible for a 30 percent to 50 percent discount on the Taiwan High Speed Rail (THSR) as part of an effort to boost passenger volume. THSR said it would offer discounted travel for university students every day for non-rush hour journeys on 168 train trips a week. A 30 percent discount would be available for journeys between 9:36am and 11pm Monday to Friday and between 8:54pm and 9:36pm Monday through Thursday, THSR said. Saturdays and Sundays, students will be eligible for a 30 percent discount for journeys taken between 10:36am and 11am, it said. A 50 percent discount would be offered to students traveling between Taipei and Zuoying from 9:54pm to 10:12pm, Monday through Thursday. Students will also get a 50 percent discount on some train trips between Taipei and Taichung, Taichung and Zuoying (左營) early in the morning and at night from Monday through Thursday. However, the discounts will not be available for seats in business class or on unreserved economy class tickets. Students must show a valid student ID at station counters when buying discounted tickets for the designated non-rush periods, THSR said.
DIPLOMACY
Charity concert in Singapore
Taiwan’s representative office in Singapore celebrated the centenary of the Republic of China with a charity concert on Saturday, donating the proceeds from ticket sales to a charitable organization in the city-state. The ticket revenue — about NT$7 million (US$231,030) — was donated to the President’s Challenge, a charitable organization that helped the less fortunate in Singapore. The concert attracted about 7,500 people and featured 10 groups of Taiwanese performers singing hit Taiwanese songs, including 52-year-old Lee Chien-fu (李建復), Wu Bai (伍佰), Emile Chau (周華健) and Lala Hsu (徐佳瑩).
HEALTH
Lu cooks up veggie dish
Former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) cooked a vegetarian dish yesterday while urging the public to adopt a vegetarian diet, echoing a UN call for less consumption of meat for a sustainable environment. At a one-day “green” fair in Taipei, Lu made a dish of bitter gourd with king oyster mushrooms, and called on the public to have one vegetarian meal per day. Lu said reducing consumption of animal products is the “most effective” approach to pursue a sustainable environment, along with growing trees and lowering carbon emissions. “If everyone were to quit eating meat for one day, it would generate the same benefit as planting 200 to 300 trees,” she said. Lu, who has been on a vegetarian diet for more than four months, said she is an example of how a diet without meat can be healthy and beneficial. “People have started saying I have been looking younger since I went on a vegetarian diet,” she said.
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,