Servicemen set to spend their alternative military service terms abroad expressed excitement yesterday over their future roles in supporting assistance programs and cooperative projects.
The 85 conscripts, who have just finished a six-week training program, will be sent to 22 countries — mostly the nation’s diplomatic allies — for 10 months later this month, according to the International Cooperation and Development Fund (TaiwanICDF), which trained the recruits.
“We are very excited,” said a 25-year-old surnamed Ni (倪), who has a master’s degree in information engineering and who is heading to Tuvalu to help set up an electronic system for medical records. “It is a good opportunity to put what I have learned in school into practice.”
The conscripts will join Taiwanese technical support groups and medical missions to help carry out projects in fields such as agriculture, public health and information technologies, TaiwanICDF said.
Their six weeks of training included language classes and sessions on international etiquette and the local culture of their destinations, the organization said.
A 25-year-old surnamed Peng (彭) said he is looking forward to making a contribution to his host country, Nicaragua, and hopes that he will be able to adapt easily to the local culture.
He said he will be working to help improve rice farming there.
“I have been interested in international aid programs for a long time,” said Peng, who holds a master’s degree in agronomy.
At a ceremony held to mark the completion of their training program yesterday, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Secretary-General Gary Lin (林松煥) encouraged the conscripts to engage with local people and learn to appreciate different cultures.
In the past 12 years the government has sent 920 conscripts to work on its assistance programs and cooperative projects around the world as part of the military alternative service, TaiwanICDF 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
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,