MEDIA
Cities to screen ‘Linsanity’
A documentary about Jeremy Lin (林書豪), the first NBA player of Taiwanese descent, will be screened in about 20 cities in the US from Oct. 4, according to a report in the Houston Chronicle yesterday. Linsanity features Lin’s inspirational story, from his childhood to his meteoric ascent to stardom early last year with the New York Knicks that made the 24-year-old Harvard graduate a household name and created the phenomenon from which the documentary takes its name. Directed by Evan Jackson Leong (梁伊凡), the film will be shown first in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, the report said. Lin, who currently plays for the Houston Rockets, is scheduled to arrive in Taiwan on Aug. 14 for a week-long stay.
POLITICS
Hau appoints office director
Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) yesterday appointed Department of Information and Communication Commissioner Chao Hsin-ping (趙心屏) as director of his mayoral office. Chao will be replaced by Sun Ting-lung (孫廷龍), director of New Taipei City’s (新北市) Culture Foundation and a former deputy editor-in-chief of the Chinese-language China Times. Hau said Chao’s job will be to improve the city’s media market and communication with the press as part of efforts to improve the city’s overall image. Chao, who has served as commissioner for more than two years, said she would seek to negotiate with all city government departments to promote municipal development. Sun said he will use his 30 years of media experience to boost the city’s reputation and the number of tourists visiting the nation’s capital. The appointments take effect on Thursday next week.
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