POLITICS
Ko retires as professor
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday retired from his position as professor at National Taiwan University College of Medicine and National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH). Ko ended his eight-year term as Taipei mayor on Dec. 25 last year and returned to NTUH to resume his work as a professor and physician. However, on Jan. 13, he announced that he had applied for early retirement. Ko has previously indicated his interest in running for next year’s presidential election. Asked about his plans, Ko yesterday said he was still thinking about it.
ASTRONOMY
Comet livestream tonight
The Taipei Astronomical Museum is to hold an online astronomical event tonight as it livestreams the flight of a comet that last passed by Earth about 50,000 years ago. The live stream tracking the movement of the comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF), expected to be at its closest to Earth today, is to begain at 7:30pm on its YouTube channel, with two “Vtubers” from the Xtreme Deep Field Project present to provide insight into comets, it said. The comet is expected to be bright enough for stargazers to observe with the naked eye if there is no light pollution and will appear as a blurred luminous globe in the sky, it said. The comet was “first identified in March 2022 by the wide-field survey camera at the Zwicky Transient Facility inside the orbit of Jupiter,” SPACE.com said. When first spotted, it was about 4.3 astronomical units (640 million kilometers) away from the sun and mistaken for an asteroid, but ongoing observation that detected a tail showed that it was a comet, the museum said.
NATURE
Hands off cameras: Chiayi
The Chiayi Forest District Office yesterday urged visitors not to tamper with motion sensor cameras in forests, as more humans were captured by the cameras last year than animals in the wild. Thirty infrared motion sensor cameras have been installed in forest conservation areas that the office monitors to capture images of species in the wild. While the cameras have photographed a broad diversity of mountain wildlife in central and southern Taiwan, they filmed more humans than animals last year, the office responsible for forests in Yunlin and Chiayi counties and Tainan and Kaohsiung said. Many people are curious about the cameras, and a few of the devices have been stolen, it said. People have also tampered with the cameras’ positions, making them less likely to capture images of animals, it said.
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,