ENTERTAINMENT
Lee named 10th top director
Two-time Oscar-winning film director Ang Lee (李安) has been ranked 10th on this year’s list of the 21st century’s top 100 directors compiled by the Web site They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? To qualify among the 100 most critically acclaimed filmmakers of the 21st century, each director or directing team needs to have a minimum of two films released between 2000 and last year and be cited in the site’s list of top 1,000 films of the 21st century, it said. Lee made the No. 10 with four of his films included in the top 1,000 films list — while Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮) and Hou Hsiao-hsiang (侯孝賢) ranked 34th and 36th respectively. Hong Kong film director Wong Kar-wai (王家衛) retained his top spot on the list, followed by the US’ David Lynch, Austria’s Michael Haneke, Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul and the US’ Paul Thomas Anderson.
TRAVEL
Cash limits tightened
Regulations prohibiting travelers from entering or leaving the nation with excessive sums of undeclared cash have been tightened, the Customs Administration said on Wednesday, adding that from June 28, anyone trying to transport NT$100,000 or more in cash without declaring it will face having the money immediately confiscated. Under current regulations, passengers and flight crew must declare any cash they are transporting into or out of the nation if it exceeds NT$100,000, US$10,000 or 20,000 yuan. Any amount of foreign currency in excess of the limits would be seized at customs checkpoints. For New Taiwan dollars, outbound travelers are allowed to deposit the excess at customs before leaving and retrieve it upon return.
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,