WEATHER
Plum rains to start Friday
The two-month rainy season in Taiwan will start this year with the arrival of the first plum rains on Friday, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday. However, compared with previous years, this month may be slightly warmer and drier, while next month is expected to be more humid and cooler, Weather Forecast Center director Cheng Ming-dean (鄭明典) said. During the plum rain season, peculiar to East Asia and thus named because it coincides with the ripening of plums, frontal systems tend to linger over Taiwan, bringing severe thunderstorms and heavy rain for days at a time. This year, the most intense rainfall is expected from late this month to early next month and the chances of torrential rainfall will be especially high next month, Cheng said.
CRIME
Kaohsiung officials convicted
Twenty Greater Kaohsiung city councilors, including the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) city council speaker Hsu Kun-yuan (許崑源), were found guilty of fraud and forging documents, among other charges yesterday. Hsu was given a one-year sentence, while former Greater Kaohsiung council speaker Chuan Chi-wang (莊啟旺), also of the KMT, was given a five-month sentence by the Kaohsiung District Court. The sentences can be commuted to fines. Hsu, Chuan and several other councilors were found guilty of using the names of other people to set up dummy accounts to apply for wage payments for councilor assistants. Some of those found guilty were members of the Democratic Progressive Party and independents. They were given sentences ranging from two months to one year and ten months. The case came to light in 2007, when Kaohsiung City traffic police units were investigating irregularities of people’s names and addresses on traffic tickets.
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