The Taipei City Government yesterday shrugged off the Ministry of Education's plan to oversee high school admissions, saying it would go ahead with its proposal to hold competency exams with Taipei County and Keelung City in 2011.
The Ministry of Education published a draft amendment of the Senior High School Law (高級中等學校法) on Thursday which would authorize the ministry to regulate high school admissions and school districts.
At present, high schools and vocational schools fall under the jurisdiction of their local city governments.
"The ministry is trying to centralize power and prevent Taipei from holding its own exams. It's against the spirit of education deregulation," Commissioner of Taipei City's Education Department Wu Ching-chi (吳清基) told a press conference at Taipei City Hall.
Wu said the ministry's proposal would not affect the city's plan to standardize school textbooks in Taipei City, Taipei County and Keelung next year before holding competency exams in 2011.
Wu said the city government welcomed the ministry's move to label municipal high schools as "national" high schools, but added that standardized textbooks and local competency exams would reduce the burden on students.
"The ministry's proposal has already raised concerns among schools and parents and it is not certain that the draft will pass the legislature. We will just continue with our plans," he said, adding that the department would voice its opposition to the draft in a public hearing to be held next week.
The city government has been at odds with the ministry over the issues of standardization of textbooks and local competency exams.
During his election campaign, Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) promised to standardize textbooks in the city to "reduce the burden" on middle school students.
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,