Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (
Hu said that this is because Takeng, known as the "Yangmingshan of Taichung," has more bamboo, the main food of pandas.
Hu made the remarks a day after outgoing Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (
Hu said Taichung has for three-and-a-half years actively sought to house Chinese pandas. Noting that although Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
The local media has speculated that the KMT hopes the pandas will be housed in Taichung in order to help Hu's campaign for a second term in office in the year-end mayoral election.
If the pandas are housed in Taichung, Hu said he will not rule out the possibility of having them shown temporarily in the south, so people in that part of the country don't have to travel all the way to Taichung to see the furry creatures.
China offered to send a pair of pandas to the Taiwanese people as a goodwill gift at the conclusion of Lien's visit to China in early May.
A senior official of the Cabinet-level Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said recently that the pandas can be sent to Taiwan on four conditions: that appropriate application procedures are followed, that a suitable living environment for the pandas is found, that all relevant regulations on delivery are abided by and that approval is obtained from major international conservation groups.
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,