NATURE
Chinese park to sign accord
A national park in Greater Tainan is set to sign a cooperation agreement with a nature reserve in China, which will mark the first time that the two sides have worked together on conserving internationally recognized wetlands, a park official said. Leu Teng-yuan (呂登元), director of the Taijiang National Park Headquarters, confirmed yesterday he and a delegation are scheduled to depart for Shanghai on Tuesday to sign the agreement with the city’s Chongming Dongtan Birds National Nature Reserve the following day. The cooperation agreement will focus on banding migratory birds, strengthening wetlands conservation and restoration projects, as well as building an information exchange platform. Taijiang’s famed Cigu (七股) and Sihcao (四草) wetlands are among Taiwan’s most important migration sites of the endangered black-faced spoonbill.
LEGAL
Bill looks to cut reward
Lawmakers on the legislature’s Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee passed a preliminary review of a draft amendment to the Civil Code yesterday that would lower the reward a person can receive when returning lost property. The amendment lowers the percentage from 30 percent to 10 percent of the property’s value and it also prohibits seeking a reward from disadvantaged families, including families with low incomes, recipients of emergency aid and victims of natural disasters. The amendments were introduced by legislators after an incident in December 2010 in which a National University of Kaohsiung law student found NT$21,000 (US$715) that had been lost by a single mother, surnamed Lee (李). The money was Lee’s living expenses for her whole family, but despite this, the law student still demanded 30 percent.
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,
‘GROWING UP TOGETHER’: Jensen Huang celebrated the nation’s role in the formation of the tech firm at a Silicon Valley gathering, saying ‘Taiwan saved Nvidia’ Taiwan is in the center of the new artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) told a gathering with Taiwanese on Thursday in Silicon Valley’s largest city, San Jose. Tainan-born Huang said it must be celebrated that “Taiwan is right in the middle” of a new industrial revolution in which “something new is being made, and made in a new way.” Huang recalled the manufacturing process of the RIVA 128 graphics processing unit, Nvidia’s first commercial success, describing it as the “most complicated chip at the time.” As Nvidia did not have the budget, he wrote a letter to Taiwan