The inter-party negotiations on the draft statute regulating the investigative committee on the March 19 assassination attempt broke down yesterday when the Taiwan Solidarity Union and the Non-Partisan Solidarity Union (NPSU) failed to show up, and the caucuses present could not come to an agreement.
Yesterday's negotiation was chaired by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Huang Chao-shun (
The DPP and the pan-blue caucuses blamed each other for the failure to reach a conclusion. DPP caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (
"The pan-blue caucuses have proposed four different versions so far, and they are not confident about which one is the best," Ker said. "We hope they can make sure of what they want first and avoid violating the Constitution."
Ker said that the latest draft statute proposed by the pan-blue caucuses was to make the committee into a "super Control Yuan," allowing it to command the police, and exclude participation by officials from state-owned businesses and the administrative, legislative, examination and control branches.
Pan-blue caucuses criticized the DPP for being insincere.
"The DPP said it wanted to establish the investigative committee, yet it has boycotted the negotiations on the statute. Maybe the DPP doesn't want to pursue the truth after all," KMT caucus whip Tseng Yung-chuan (
The pan-blue caucuses released their latest version of the statute yesterday before the inter-party negotiations started.
The most important change in the latest version was to exclude Control Yuan President Fredrick Chien's (
The pan-blue's latest version stipulates that the committee consists of 17 members recommended by the caucuses. The 17 members will choose their own chairman among themselves.
In related news, in yesterday's extra legislative session, there was no review of the controversial Farmers' Association Law (
But the pan-blue caucuses managed to sneak through their version of the Organic Law of the Central Election Commission (
Huang, who chaired the session, called for resumption of the session while the DPP legislators were absent and passed the pan-blues' version.
The DPP caucus, unhappy with the move, threatened that it could still force the draft law to go through the four-month negotiation period.
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,