ENTERTAINMENT
Comic artist wins in France
Taiwanese comic artist Liu Chien-fan (劉倩帆) on Thursday won second place in the digital comics category at the 45th Angouleme International Comics Festival in France. The festival, which opened on Thursday and attracts more than 200,000 visitors each year, awards several prestigious industry prizes, for which six Taiwanese were nominated this year. Liu, who was nominated in the same category as Linx (次叔), Eli Lin (林倩羽) and Asta Wu (吳雅怡), was awarded for her work Plongee (French for “diving”) about a day in the life of a deaf girl who is waiting to get a hearing aid. It was the first time that Liu submitted her work, which incorporates flash animation and GIF files, to the festival, so she was surprised to find out that she had won, she said. Taiwan was also well represented in the Young Talent competition, with artists Chin Wei (覃偉) and Arwen Huang selected from among the 20 finalists, although neither won. All six nominated artists’ work is to be on display at the festival’s Taiwan Pavilion until Jan. 28.
FOREIGN AID
Taiwan offers islands relief
As the US rebuilds in the wake of the devastation brought by Hurricane Maria, Taiwan is lending a helping hand to disaster relief efforts with a US$20,000 donation each to the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. According to a statement from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Miami, Director General Philip Wang (王贊禹) visited St Croix, the largest of the islands that make up the Virgin Islands on Jan. 10 and 11. During his visit, he met with Virgin Islands Lieutenant-Governor Osbert Potter and donated US$20,000 to disaster relief efforts, to be used by the Community Foundation of the Virgin Islands to rebuild after the hurricane in September. Wang made a similar trip to Puerto Rico from Jan. 16 to 18, where he presented Governor Ricardo Rossello with the US$20,000 donation. Rossello expressed his desire to visit Taiwan once more progress has been made rebuilding Puerto Rico.
TRAFFIC
Loose screws cause chaos
A truck driver surnamed Wu (吳) failed to properly secure the buckets of screws he was transporting on Thursday, causing nearly 1,000 to fall onto the road, damaging the tires of several cars and motorcycles, the Kaohsiung Police Department said. Alian Police Station chief Wu Yen-cheng (吳燕成) said that after receiving a report, police officers were dispatched to the scene to investigate and collected nearly 1,000 screws. At least 10 people have lodged complaints and demanded compensation for damaged tires, he said. The truck driver apologized and said he was willing to compensate everyone for the damage.
CRIME
Man arrested for growing pot
A Tainan resident was on Tuesday arrested by police for growing marijuana on the roof of his residence, Taipei police authorities said on Thursday. Taipei Police Department anti-drug center head Huang Ren-jian (黃壬鍵) said the man, surnamed Ting (丁), 44, was found to have engaged in suspicious activity online that led police to believe he was growing marijuana at his home in Tainan. After several months of investigation, police discovered that Ting purchased marijuana seeds from Web sites abroad and grew marijuana with other plants at his home in a bid to prevent detection, Huang said. Ting has been turned over to prosecutors for further investigation on charges of violating the Narcotics Hazard Prevention Act (毒品危害防制條例).
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