HISTORY
Chiang documents released
More than 263,000 declassified documents pertaining to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) are now available online, Academia Historica said yesterday. The files are accessible on the institution’s archive (ahonline.drnh.gov.tw), it said in a statement. The files, 61.65 percent of which were formerly listed as confidential, were uploaded to the archive in several batches between January and last month after being individually reviewed between August and December last year. They represent 98.8 percent of all existing documents related to Chiang, the institute said. The remainder not yet online includes some that cannot be posted due to copyright restrictions (0.74 percent) and some that are restricted due to privacy concerns (0.44 percent), while the rest (0.02 percent) must remain permanently confidential to protect intelligence sources, it said.
NATIONAL DEFENSE
Frigates arriving soon
Two Perry-class guided missile frigates purchased from the US are expected to arrive in Kaohsiung on Saturday and be commissioned into service next year, military sources said yesterday. The two frigates, built in the 1980s, were formally transferred to the Republic of China Navy at a ceremony on March 9 in South Carolina. Scheduled to arrive at Zuoying Military Harbor, they are to join the navy’s 146th fleet, which is based on Penghu and is responsible for patrolling the Taiwan Strait, the sources said. Weapons system testing and personnel training will be conducted before the two frigates are formally commissioned into service, the navy has said, adding that a commissioning ceremony has been scheduled for July next year.
CRIME
Illegal job brokers arrested
An Indonesian woman and 19 others were arrested on Monday in New Taipei City on suspicion of illegally brokering jobs for illegal workers and remitting funds overseas. National Immigration Agency officials said the woman, who runs a store specializing in products from Indonesia, was suspected of sending Indonesians who had overstayed their visas to work in hospitals as nurses and cleaners. Some of them also work in the woman’s restaurant or as prostitutes, according to officials with an agency task force investigating a human trafficking ring suspected of using drugs to control Indonesian sex workers. The woman and her brother, both surnamed Wang (王), were among eight people arrested in connection with the task force’s investigation. After searching several locations, the task force also arrested 11 illegal workers and another foreign national whose visa had expired, the officials said. They said the Indonesian store remits an average of NT$100,000 (US$3,305) to Indonesia per day, or about NT$36.5 million a year.
TOURISM
Cross-strait Kinmen walk set
A cross-strait walk will be held in Kinmen on Saturday as part of efforts to promote tourism in the outlying island group, the county government said yesterday. Five hundred Chinese visitors from Xiamen and 200 Kinmen residents are expected to take part in the 6km walk, the Kinmen Association of Travel Agents said. The walk will start at Zhaishan Tunnel (翟山坑道) at 1pm and take the participants to a number of attractions before returning to the tunnel, the Kinmen Tourism Department said. The event has been organized by the department, Xiamen’s Tourism Development Commission and travel agents from the two sides.
NATIONAL SECURITY
Detention extended
A Chinese man accused of espionage is to be detained for another two months while prosecutors continue their investigation, the Taipei District Court ruled on Monday. The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office asked for more time, saying that 29-year-old Zhou Hongxu (周泓旭) was likely to flee the country or collude to destroy evidence. Zhou, from Liaoning Province, was enrolled in an MBA program at National Chengchi University in Taipei from 2012 until last year. He returned to Taiwan in February to work as a management investor. He was detained on March 10 for allegedly trying to gather classified information from schools and government offices. Investigators said that Zhou was allegedly in contact with a Ministry of Foreign Affairs official, whom he had met when a student, and was trying to persuade the official to hand over classified information in exchange for free trips abroad. Zhou has denied the accusations.
TRANSPORTATION
Review of big bike access
Deputy Minister of Transportation and Communications Wang Kwo-tsai (王國材) said a meeting is scheduled for Friday to discuss changing regulations to allow large motorcycles on freeways. Experts, local government officials and bikers’ rights advocates have been invited. At present, large motorcycles — those with an engine of 550cc or larger — are only allowed on a 5.6km spur of the Chiang Wei-shui Freeway (National Freeway No. 3), which connects Taipei and New Taipei City’s Shenkeng District (深坑), on a trial basis. However, surveillance footage has shown that many of the bikers who have used the spur swerved in and out of traffic, as many people expected, Wang said. It is such behavior that has led to restrictions on big bikes on freeways, Wang added.
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