Staff reporter, in Managua, Nicaragua
American Institute in Taiwan Chairman Raymond Burghardt is scheduled to visit Taiwan after the Lunar New Year to express the US government's concern over the arms procurement package.
New Year's Eve falls on Feb. 17 this year.
Presidential Office Deputy Secretary-General Liu Shih-fang (劉世芳) on Tuesday told reporters accompanying President Chen Shui-bian (
Liu added that the president also held a meeting with former US secretary of defense William Perry at Chen's presidential suite during his 16-hour transit stop in San Francisco.
Right decision
Perry, who served under former US president Bill Clinton, told Chen that the US government had done the right thing when it dispatched two aircraft carrier groups to the Taiwan Strait to counter the Chinese in March 1996 before Taiwan's presidential election because the election was important to both the US and Taiwan governments.
Liu said Perry was also interested in the next presidential election. Perry asked Chen who he would support in the poll, but Chen replied that it was too early to tell, Liu said.
While there is no certainty that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (
"The election pairing is not something that is mathematical but chemical," Liu quoted Chen as saying.
Berkeley meetings
Chen also met Donald McQuade, vice chancellor for University Relations at the University of California, Berkeley and Yeh Wen-hsin (
Several US congressmen held telephone conversations with Chen.
US Senator Lisa Murkowski (Republican-Alaska), Senator Trent Lott (Republican-Mississippi), Congressman Steve Chabot (Republican-Ohio), Congressman Tom Lantos (Democratic-California) and Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Republican-California), held telephone conversations with Chen.
All of them expressed concern over the long-stalled arms procurement plan and the possibility of inking a free trade agreement between Taiwan and the US, Liu said.
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
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,
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