With speculation already circulating about who will represent the major opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to run in next year's Taipei mayoral election, KMT Chairman-elect Ma Ying-jeou (
Ma, who won a landslide victory in the KMT chairmanship election July 16 and is scheduled to be sworn in to his new post Aug. 19, said that he welcomes all talented people who are determined to serve the city of Taipei as mayor to enter the race.
Ma denied a media report that sitting Taipei Deputy Mayor Yeh Chin-chuan (
He added that the KMT has maintained a viable mechanism to produce KMT candidates for major elections. If no conclusion is reached via preliminary negotiations, primaries conducted via voting or public opinion polls should both be feasible and effective ways of producing KMT candidates, he said.
On the notion of a merger of the three pan-blue political parties -- the KMT, the People First Party (PFP) and the New Party -- in order to beat the ruling Democratic Progressive Party and its ally, the Taiwan Solidarity Union, in the next Taipei mayoral election, Ma said that it is still too early to talk about how a pan-blue candidate should be produced for the mayoral election.
"The earliest time should be at the beginning of next year," he added.
Meanwhile, KMT Legislator John Chiang (
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,