President Chen Shui-bian's (
Analysts said the outcome may be related to a recent string of corruption scandals involving administration officials as well as an insider stock trading controversy that may implicate Chen's son-in-law.
The nationwide survey was carried out by telephone on Monday and Tuesday, with 1,063 valid responses received. It had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
The survey found that as many as 77 percent of Taiwanese are dissatisfied with Chen's performance, while only 28 percent are unhappy with Su's performance.
Only 26 percent of respondents expressed approval for Chen's recently concluded visit to Latin America, during which he made several surprise stops including Libya and Indonesia.
Thirty-one percent of respondents said they were satisfied with the Cabinet's performance and 50 percent were not. When asked to rate the performance of Chen, Su and the Cabinet, on average respondents rated Chen 44.5 percent, Su 60.6 percent and the Cabinet 54.4 percent.
According to the survey, the three Cabinet agencies with the highest approval rating were the Consumer Protection Commission, the Environmental Protection Administration and the Ministry of the Interior, in that order.
The most popular Cabinet member is commission Chairwoman and Vice Premier Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), followed by Minister of Transportation and Communications Kuo Yao-chi (郭瑤琪) and Minister of Foreign Affairs James Huang (黃志芳).
Similar to the results of a previous survey two months ago, 31 percent of respondents expressed confidence in Su's pledge to improve the country's law and order situation within six months, compared to 61 percent who expressed no confidence in the measure.
Although 59 percent of respondents said they felt safe walking around their neighborhood at night, only 24 percent were satisfied with the overall law and order situation. They said the most urgent crimes the government should tackle are fraud, illegal gun possession, drug trafficking, organized crime, women's and children's safety, robbery, sex-related crimes and gambling.
Compared with the results of a survey two months ago, 19 percent of respondents thought the law and order situation had improved, 16 percent thought it had gotten worse and 60 percent thought it was unchanged.
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
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,