The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said yesterday it will send an airline representative and the head of the Civil Aviation Association to landmark talks with China this weekend to set up two-way charter flights bringing Taiwanese business-people home for the Lunar New Year holiday.
"We have decided to appoint Michael Lo (樂大信) and Billy Chang (張國政) to organize a negotiation team to talk with the mainland side in Macau on Jan. 15," the MAC said in a statement released last night.
Lo, chairman of the Taipei Airlines Association (TAA), has already been authorized to represent the government in talks with China.
On Wednesday, Beijing said that, in addition to the MAC and its proxy the semi-official Straits Exchange Foundation, it is "negotiable" for Taiwan to send officials like Chang, director of the Civil Aeronautics Administration, as consultants to talk with China.
The MAC yesterday called on China to live up to its words to speedily hold talks with Taiwan.
"We hope China's side can speedily inform us who will be on its negotiation list to talk with us and to confirm whether it agrees to the date proposed by us to talk," the MAC said in its press release.
If everything goes well, the charter flights will be the first in more than five decades to have planes from both Taiwan and China entering their respective territories for flight services.
The two sides have reached a tacit understanding that this year's holiday charter flights will be "bilateral, reciprocal and non-stop," unlike the flights in 2003, when Taiwanese airlines had to fly empty to Shanghai to pick up Taiwanese and bring them back with stopovers in either Hong Kong or Macau.
This time, the two sides will also talk about expanding the flight points to at least Beijing and Guangzhou, in addition to Shanghai.
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,