Two senior members of the pan-blue camp are in Washington to promote the "Global Union of Chinese Commonwealth," a proposed grouping that seeks to unite Chinese people around the world and which places peace in the Taiwan Strait on the top of its agenda.
New Party Chairman Yok Mu-ming (
Yok said that he mentioned the idea during a meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) when he visited Beijing in July, and said he would raise the issue during a discussion with scholars from the Brookings Institution yesterday. He did not say how or even if Hu responded to his suggestion.
Lei, who also hosts a TV talk show, said that seeking cross-strait peace was the guiding principle of the grouping and that unification was only one of the options.
When asked if the grouping seemed naive at a time when China still refuses to renounce the use of force against Taiwan, Lei said that pursuing cross-strait peace is the common wish of all Taiwan's people. She said that the New Party expected Beijing to show goodwill toward Taiwan to help expedite peace in the Taiwan Strait.
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
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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