TRAVEL
Caution urged in Turkey
Taiwanese headed to Turkey are advised to take precautions to ensure their personal safety even if the protests in Instanbul’s Taksim Square have subsided, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) official said yesterday. Department of West Asian and African Affairs Director-General David Wang (王建業) said the ministry’s “yellow” alert for Turkey issued when the riots erupted in May remained in place. The ministry’s travel advisory system consists of “gray,” “yellow,” “orange” and “red” alerts, with “red” reflecting the highest risk. It raised its travel alerts for Cairo, Alexandria and Saidegang in Egypt to “orange” on Sunday, while the alert level for Egypt as a whole remained “yellow.” The “red” alert for Pakistan remains in effect, the ministry said, and it issued a “gray” alert for 13 atolls in the Marshall Islands because of severe drought conditions.
DIPLOMACY
Burkina Faso trip planned
Council of Labor Affairs Minister Pan Shih-wei (潘世偉) is to visit Burkina Faso next week to check on the progress of bilateral cooperation on vocational training, MOFA said yesterday. Pan is to lead a delegation at Burkina Faso’s invitation from Monday to Wednesday, David Wang said. The main purpose of Pan’s visit is to check on a vocational training program that Taiwan has supported to improve the skill levels of the West African ally’s people, Wang said. The delegation is scheduled to visit a vocational training center in Ziniare and a vocational high school in Koudougou that were set up with Taiwan’s help, the ministry said. Opened in 2010, the training center offers classes in baking, automobile maintenance and electronics.
NATIONAL DEFENSE
Five-day war game set
The military will hold a five-day computer-aided war game this month, the Ministry of National Defense said. The computerized drills, the second part of the annual Han Kuang exercises, are aimed at testing the military’s combat readiness in the event of an attack by Chinese forces, ministry spokesman Major General David Lo (羅紹和) said. Chief of General Staff General Yen Ming (嚴明) is to supervise the round-the-clock drills to be staged nationwide from July 15 to July 19, Lo said. He would not confirm a report on Monday that said the drills would stimulate an attack in 2017 involving China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning. The first phase of the Han Kuang exercises were held over five days in April.
GAMING
Wayi Spiders win silver
The Wayi Spiders won a silver medal on Monday in the SF Online event of the 2013 Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games after being defeated by a South Korean team in the gold medal encounter in Incheon, South Korea. The Spiders lost 2-1 after reaching the finals of the event by whitewashing a team from Mongolia 8-0 in under 30 minutes on Sunday. In addition to competitive video gaming, more than 100 Taiwanese athletes are competing in events such as billiards, bowling, chess, dance, soccer, kabaddi and kurash and swimming. The 4th Asian Indoor & Martial Arts Games are being held at Samsan World Gymnasium opened on Saturday last week and run through Saturday as a test event for the 17th Asian Games next year. Cybersports have become increasingly popular in Taiwan after the Taipei Assassins team won the League of Legends Season 2 World Championship in Los Angeles, California, in October last year.
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,