WEATHER
Temperatures to rise
There will be a higher risk of fog from today to Wednesday as temperatures rise across the nation, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday. A band of rain-bearing cloud has gradually moved away from Taiwan, the bureau said, and milder weather with clearer skies and higher temperatures is expected to last until Wednesday. However, the abrupt fluctuation in temperature, which is common in spring, also brings a greater chance of fog, especially in the west and the outlying islands of Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu. Temperatures are forecast to range between 18oC and 27oC in the north, 19oC and 27oC in central Taiwan, 21oC and 30oC in the south and 16oC and 28oC in the east. Another cold front is expected to arrive on Thursday, bringing higher chances of rain and colder temperatures, the bureau said.
CULTURE
Speech contest held
Radio Taiwan International (RTI) has started registration for this year’s Mandarin speech contest for foreign nationals. Registration will be open until 5pm on May 11. RTI said it welcomes all foreign nationals who speak a native tongue other than Mandarin or Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) and who are in Taiwan legally to register for the contest. According to the station, topics for the speeches, which can be no longer than three minutes, include anything related to Chinese language and culture or stories about life in Taiwan. The top prize is a NT$60,000 cash award. For more details, call (02) 2885-6188 ext. 723, or visit the station’s Web site.
EDUCATION
Drum band goes to festival
The principal of Jianshan Elementary School in Greater Kaohsiung yesterday thanked the public for donating over NT$3 million (US$101,430) to help send the school’s drum team to a cultural festival in Germany. Out of 4,000 performers from 107 countries, the school was the only elementary school from Taiwan to be invited to the event. The school’s samba drum team, which consists of 28 students from Taiwan’s indigenous Bunun tribe, was invited to attend the four-day Carnival of Cultures in Berlin from May 25 to 28. The school’s travel fees were subsidized by the city’s education bureau, religious groups, and other civic groups and donors. To many children living in remote areas, traveling abroad is a distant dream, said Kaohsiung Education Bureau Director-General Jheng Sin-huei (鄭新輝).
NARCOTICS
Drugs found in Kenting
Police detained more than a dozen alleged drug users yesterday in Kenting (墾丁), Pingtung County, which is crowded with thousands of people attending a music festival. Acting on a tip-off, police raided a hotel in Kenting and arrested two women in their room for drug use. Paraphernalia for using ketamine and remnants of the drug were found in the hotel room and the two sisters, aged 27 and 25, were taken in for questioning, police said. The women said they were from Taoyuan County and were in Kenting to attend the annual Spring Scream music festival. At another hotel in the area, police arrested 11 people on suspicion of drug use. The arrests followed a raid on Wednesday in which six people were detained on suspicion of intending to sell drugs in the area during the five-day music festival.
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