POLITICS
Threats lead to arrest
A man was arrested in Taipei on Monday for making a telephone threat against President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) life, Taipei police said. The man, 57, identified only by his surname, Liu (劉), works as a driver at a construction company. After his arrest, Liu reportedly said he had lost control after watching a political talk show on TV and he only “meant to stimulate the campaign of the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT]” without ever intending to actually harm Ma. The Taipei City Police Duty Command Center said it received a call on Nov. 8 from a man who hung up the phone after saying three times: “I want to kill Ma Ying-jeou.” The suspect has been handed over to the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office for further questioning.
CRIME
Man charged in lottery fraud
Taipei prosecutors yesterday indicted a suspect in a sports lottery fraud case and asked the court to sentence him to two-and-a-half years in prison. The suspect, Lin Hao-chin (林昊縉), a former assistant manager at Taiwan Sports Lottery Corp, was accused of swindling lottery winnings by using his position to have his girlfriend and two friends bet on sports events after the results were known. The others were not indicted. Prosecutors said Lin asked them to represent him in betting on sports events, but they did not know about his scheme. Prosecutors said Lin was responsible for opening and closing the betting system. He allegedly rebooted a computer to accept bets on the “Da San Yuan” (大三元) and “Da Si Xi” (大四喜) after betting had closed and sports results had come out. Prosecutors said that Lin committed fraud seven times in May, allowing him to swindle more than NT$3.8 million (US$125,000). He was charged with fraud, breach of trust and forgery.
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,