TRANSPORTATION
Road closed due to weather
A section of the Alishan Highway in Chiayi County has been temporarily closed at night as a precaution against possible landslides due to an approaching weather front, the Directorate-General of Highways said. The area near the 76.68km mark of Provincial Highway No. 18 is to be closed from 8pm to 6am today and tomorrow, the Fifth Maintenance Office said, adding that the section was closed on Tuesday and Friday last week due to falling rocks. The site, which is prone to landslides, is undergoing concrete wall reinforcement, it said. As the approaching weather front was forecast to bring thundershowers to the nation’s mountainous areas, the office warned that motorists should avoid the area after 8pm.
SAFETY
Three workers killed by gas
Three workers were on Monday killed in an accident after reportedly being poisoned by hydrogen sulfide gas while repairing a building’s underground sewage equipment, a Kaohsiung City Government official said. The Kaohsiung Fire Bureau at 4:39pm received a report that three workers were trapped in an underground reservoir of a downtown building while fixing sewage equipment, Kaohsiung Labor Affairs Bureau section head Hsu Feng-yuan (許?源) said, adding that the workers were rescued by Fire Bureau personnel and sent to a nearby hospital, where they were pronounced dead on arrival. A preliminary investigation found that the concentration of hydrogen sulfide gas in the underground reservoir was 52 parts per million, exceeding the legal limit of 10 parts per million, Hsu said. The Labor Affairs Bureau ordered the repair work to be suspended immediately and fined the workers’ employer NT$300,000 for failing to take proper safety precautions, Hsu 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
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,