Fulfilling its earlier promise, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) yesterday took advantage of the Lunar New Year to call on former party members to come back to the fold.
"The KMT, with a grateful attitude and the utmost respect, would like to invite 18 new members to the presidium of the Central Advisory Council (CAC). In this new year, we hope to use your experiences to hold ourselves to the spirit of the cock that crows despite the dark and rainy night," said KMT Chairman Lien Chan (連戰) yesterday while issuing invitations to senior pan-blue politicians.
In honor of Wednesday's Lunar New Year's day, the KMT held a tea gathering yesterday at its Taipei headquarters for Lien to officially meet with blue camp old guard members and invite them to become members of the presidium.
A focus of media attention yesterday was the inclusion of former KMT members Hau Pei-tsun (郝柏村), Lin Yang-kang (林洋港), Hsu Li-lung (許歷農) and Shao En-hsin (邵恩新) on the list of presidium candidates.
All four were former KMT heavyweights who are either now independents or New Party members.
"By welcoming Hau, Lin, Hsu and Shao back into the KMT's ranks, the KMT is fulfilling the decision made in our Jan. 19 Central Standing Committee meeting to invite `old comrades' to rejoin the KMT. This is only the first of such invitations," KMT Spokesman Chang Jung-kung (張榮恭) said in a statement released Saturday night.
The KMT decided last month to begin inviting former party members back into the party as part of its efforts to consolidate the pan-blue camp. The party also decided last month to amend its party's regulations so that ex-members who had been expelled from the party or whose party membership had been revoked more than a year ago could immediately apply to re-join the party with no restrictions.
The amendment has been widely viewed as an appeal to members of the People First Party (PFP). The PFP and KMT were originally slated to merge after last December's legislative elections, but the two parties have remained split after disagreements in the runup to that election.
At yesterday's new year's meeting, Hau urged PFP Chairman James Soong (
"I won't give an opinion on Soong returning to the KMT," Hau said yesterday. "However, I still hope that he will come back, in the interest of unity."
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
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,
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