The recent outstanding performance of Jeremy Lin (林書豪) at the NBA has invigorated basketball fans and helped boost sales of sports-lottery tickets, with gamblers counting on the -Taiwanese-American player to help his team, the New York Knicks, to their sixth consecutive victory.
The Knicks are scheduled to square off against the Toronto Raptors this morning. Taiwan Sport Lottery Corp (TSLC) said it had opened the game for betting, with the Knicks favored by a five-point spread.
“Lin is the first Taiwanese-American player who has made it to the NBA,” TSLC president Hong Chu-min (洪主民) said.
“He has drawn a lot of attention, which in turn has increased the sale of lottery tickets,” Hong said.
Because of “Linsanity,” Hong said an increasing number of lottery players have bet on a Knicks win for games they play, especially after the team took down the Los Angeles Lakers 92-85 on Saturday.
Statistics from TSLC showed that only 36 percent of those betting on Saturday’s game actually placed bets on the Knicks to win. The percentage increased to 65 percent on Sunday, when New York defeated the Minnesota Timberwolves 100-98. Lin contributed to the win with 20 points, eight assists and six rebounds.
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,