Transportation
MRT offers special seats
Starting tomorrow, the Taipei Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system’s Songshan-Xindian Line is allocating special areas for pregnant women and parents with small children, Taipei Rapid Transit Corp said yesterday. Aimed at providing a better environment for these passengers, the special areas will be designated between the fourth door of the third carriage and the first door of the fourth carriage, with 24 seats offered on one train. Existing priority seats for disabled people, the elderly and others in need will not be affected, the company said. Pink heart-shaped stickers will be used as a sign for the special areas. Signs indicating the availability of such seats are to be posted on train doors and on the platform. The reason for the service is the same as the purpose of priority seats and priority escalators — that people should be considerate and yield seats to passengers with special needs, the company said.
SOCIETY
Passport name rules eased
From Jan. 1, Republic of China nationals will be allowed to add alternate Romanized names in their passports based on their pronunciation in their mother tongue, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. The change is being made to meet the pluralistic needs of the public, said Chen Shang-yu (陳尚友), head of the Bureau of Consular Affairs’ passport administration division. For example, a man of Hakka descent surnamed Huang (黃) can add the Romanized version of his last name in Hakka, Wong, to the Mandarin pronunciation. However, people will not be allowed to make changes at will after adding an alternate name on their passports, Chen said, urging people to be careful when using alternate names.
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,