Hopes that the country's two main opposition parties would be able to field a single candidate for the year-end Taipei mayoral race were dashed yesterday as People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (
Swamped by PFP legislators, city councilors and supporters, Soong registered his candidacy with the Taipei Municipal Election Committee, announcing that he was temporarily leaving the party for the election while declining to confirm whether or not there would be room for further negotiations.
"I am in no position to comment on the issue ... I already took a leave of absence from the PFP and do not represent the party now," Soong said at the committee's office.
PHOTO: CNA
In an effort to prevent a repeat of the 1994 Taipei mayoral election, when two pan-blue candidates split the vote, giving the Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) candidate Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) a surprise victory, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has been negotiating with the PFP, hoping to dissuade Soong from competing with the party's Taipei mayoral candidate Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌).
Asked whether or not he would accept any deals and make way for the KMT, Soong reiterated his determination to run in the election and downplayed the issue of pan-blue unity.
"Pan-blue voters worry about losing the election to the pan-green camp due to a split, but is the election all about winning? Keelung Mayor Hsu Tsai-li (
Hsu ran as KMT candidate and won in the Keelung mayoral election last December over his PFP counterpart Liu Wen-hsiung (
Ma yesterday reiterated that the KMT would continue to negotiate with the PFP on the issue, but acknowledged that negotiations have not been smooth.
"We've talked to the PFP many times directly or indirectly, but they are not satisfied with some of the conditions," he said while attending a municipal event.
While the KMT wanted to dissuade Soong from joining the election through negotiations, Soong has refused to budge and instead asked Ma during their closed-door meeting to dissuade Hau, according to KMT Secretary-General Chan Chun-po (
Facing a declining support rate with Soong and Independent Legislator Li Ao (李敖) splitting the pan-blue support base, Hau yesterday said his main opponent would still be DPP Taipei candidate Frank Hsieh (謝長廷), and that he would leave the issue of KMT-PFP negotiations for the party to handle.
"As a mayoral candidate, what I should do now is to spare no efforts to win the election," Hau told the press yesterday at his campaign headquarters.
Meanwhile, the pan-green camp is also facing the threat of a split as the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) yesterday refused to negotiate with the DPP on fielding one candidate in the Kaohsiung mayoral election.
The DPP's candidate is former Council of Labor Affairs chairwoman Chen Chu (
In response to DPP Chairman Yu Shyi-kun's suggestion that public surveys decide who should represent the green camp, TSU Chairman Chin-chiang (
"The TSU had suggested that the pan-green camp choose one candidate through a survey, but the DPP refused. Now it wants to do the survey and asks the TSU to withdraw from the election. What kind of negotiation is that?" he said, while accompanying Lo to complete his registration for the election.
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
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,
‘GROWING UP TOGETHER’: Jensen Huang celebrated the nation’s role in the formation of the tech firm at a Silicon Valley gathering, saying ‘Taiwan saved Nvidia’ Taiwan is in the center of the new artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) told a gathering with Taiwanese on Thursday in Silicon Valley’s largest city, San Jose. Tainan-born Huang said it must be celebrated that “Taiwan is right in the middle” of a new industrial revolution in which “something new is being made, and made in a new way.” Huang recalled the manufacturing process of the RIVA 128 graphics processing unit, Nvidia’s first commercial success, describing it as the “most complicated chip at the time.” As Nvidia did not have the budget, he wrote a letter to Taiwan