POLITICS
Actress to seek seat
Vietnamese-Taiwanese actress and model Helen Thanh Dao, who rose to fame locally with her role in the 2012 film My Little Honey Moon (野蓮香) yesterday announced that she will accept a nomination to run as a legislator-at-large in next year’s legislative elections. The actress, whose legal name is Nguyen Thanh Dao, said on Facebook that after three months of consideration, she decided to accept the nomination. However, she did not name the political party involved. She said she loves Taiwan, wants to repay society and to speak for new immigrants to the nation. She said her political platform would focus on promoting the rights of new immigrants. She said she would work toward reserving legislative seats for new immigrants based on their proportion of the population through amending the Constitution, as well as work to revise employment projects, formulate education laws, set up new immigrant committees in the government and a television channel exclusively for new immigrants.
SOCIETY
Mail carrier dies on round
A veteran mail carrier suffered a heart attack while working in Miaoli County on Tuesday and was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital, Miaoli police said yesterday. The 57-year-old man, surnamed Liu (劉), was near the Dahu Wineland Resort in Dahu Township (大湖) when he collapsed, they said. Liu had just mounted his motorbike when he keeled over, police quoted an eyewitness as saying. A Dahu Farmers’ Association employee saw Liu collapse and called 119 for an ambulance. Paramedics unsuccessfully tried to resuscitate Liu, police said. An autopsy yesterday confirmed his heart attack, they added. Liu had worked at the Miaoli Post Office since 1982 and was described as a dedicated employee.
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