CRIME
Two charged with espionage
Two defense contractors have been charged with for spying on the nation’s military for China, the High Prosecutors’ Office said on Monday. The two men, surnamed Chang (張) and Lin (林), established an engineering firm in New Taipei City in 2016, with Chang as the firm’s owner and Lin as his main business partner. The firm had since bid on Ministry of National Defense public tenders and obtained numerous military contracts. The two suspects were detained after the ministry’s counterintelligence department discovered anomalies during a regular review of military tenders and asked the national security division of the Ministry of Justice’s Investigation Bureau to jointly launch an investigation into the case, the bureau said. The investigation found that Chang and Lin allegedly took advantage of the nature of their work to gather military secrets and confidential information on national security. They also visited China frequently and received money from unknown sources, the bureau said. The two suspects were apprehended in June and their detention was approved by the High Court.
EARTHQUAKES
Second temblor hits Hualien
A magnitude 4.3 earthquake shook eastern Taiwan at 8:47am yesterday, the Central Weather Bureau. The earthquake was centered 28.7km southwest of Hualien County Hall in Shoufeng Township (壽豐) at a depth of 6.2km, the bureau’s Seismology Center said. The earthquake’s intensity, which gauges the actual effects of an earthquake, was highest in Hualien, where it measured 4 on Taiwan’s seven-tier intensity scale, while it measured 2 in Yilan County and 1 in Nantou County. No immediate damage or injuries were reported. It was the second earthquake in Hualien since the beginning of this month.
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,