NATURE
Pygmy hippo born at zoo
A pygmy hippopotamus was born at Taipei Zoo on Jan. 31, the first new arrival for the zoo in the Year of the Dragon, a zoo official said yesterday. The birth was not announced by zoo authorities at the time because they had no timeline for when the animal would make its public debut. The calf, a female with a birth weight of 6.01kg, was delivered while Yoshio Yamaguchi, director of Kushiro Zoo in Hokkaido, Japan, was visiting the zoo to sign a friendship agreement. Yamaguchi named the newborn Hsiao Chuan (小釧), based on the Chinese translation of Kushiro Zoo, the official said. In September, the Japanese zoo gave Taiwan a pair of red-crowned cranes — Kika and Big — as a symbol of Japan’s gratitude for Taiwan’s generous aid in the wake of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
WEATHER
Heavy fog affects traffic
Fog affected the normal flow of air and sea traffic around northern Taiwan early yesterday, hampering departures and arrivals at the country’s main airport and harbor. A total of 39 outgoing and incoming flights at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport were delayed because of the heavy fog, officials said. Five incoming flights were diverted — one to Pudong International Airport in Shanghai and four to Kaohsiung International Airport, the officials said. The fog dispersed later in the day, but some flights were still being affected. The disruption was the second in as many days caused by fog.
SOCIETY
Age not a concern in Taiwan
Taiwanese and Japanese are the two peoples in Asia that care the least about age-related issues, a survey released yesterday shows. The survey was conducted by the Anti-aging and Health Society of Taiwan earlier in the month among 1,800 adults in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. Only 21 percent of respondents from Japan and 23 percent from Taiwan said they were concerned about aging problems, compared with about 50 percent in Shanghai, the results showed. Physical, brain and memory decline are the three age-related conditions of greatest concern among all the respondents, except for those from Thailand and South Korea, who care most about wrinkles. Seventy-three percent of all respondents identified the brain as the organ that needs the most protection against the effects of aging, topping the chart in China, South Korea, Thailand, Japan and Taiwan and taking second place in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong.
AVIATION
Garuda to reopen flights
Garuda Indonesia said yesterday it would resume flights to Taiwan in May after a break of almost eight years. The Indonesian carrier said it would offer one round-trip flight per day between Taipei and Jakarta starting on May 25 and would use a Boeing 737-800 aircraft on the route. In September 2004, Garuda withdrew from the Taiwanese market after three decades of service. At the time, Taiwan and other countries in the region were struggling with the effects on their tourism and economy caused by an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). The reintroduction of Garuda Indonesia’s service in Taiwan will take place in tandem with an effort by Tourism Indonesia to promote some of the less well-known attractions in the Southeast Asian country. One such site is Komodo Island, the natural habitat of the world’s largest lizard, the Komodo dragon, Indonesian authorities 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
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