Transit stops in the US are being arranged for President Chen Shui-bian (
Chen is scheduled to visit Costa Rica and Paraguay for state visits on May 3 through May 11, while Su is scheduled to depart for Haiti and several other Caribbean allies in the middle of next month, according to officials.
The ministry expected that both Chen and Su would be able to make stopovers in the US on their way to and from Latin America and was making relevant arrangements to that end, the officials said.
Meanwhile, Chen was asked by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators yesterday to declare his advocacy of the "one side, one country" concept when he makes his stopovers in the US.
KMT Legislator Lee Ching-hua (
Lee claimed that Chen's "one side, one country" concept was tantamount to a declaration of independence and added that the president should make the stance known to Washington.
He called on Chen not to advocate Taiwanese independence only within the country, saying that the president should "declare it loudly" to US President George W. Bush during his transit stops.
Pan Wei-kang (
Pan claimed that Chen had been scheming with a series of eyebrow-raising slogans and activities -- including talk about constitutional engineering and intelligence exercises on crises and war scenarios -- to draw the public's attention away from the string of recent corruption scandals involving high-ranking government officials.
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,