■ POLITICS
Six vie for deputy speaker
Four Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators registered with the party as candidates for deputy legislative speaker yesterday, bringing the total number of hopefuls to six. KMT legislators John Chiang (蔣孝嚴), Pan Wei-kang (潘維剛), Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) and Shyu Jong-shyoung (徐中雄) sent their applications yesterday, while KMT caucus whip Tseng Yung-chuan (曾永權) and KMT Legislator Huang Chao-shun (黃昭順) registered with the party on Thursday. KMT Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄), who has promised to select the candidate via a democratic mechanism, will meet the interested candidates this afternoon to discuss the selection.
■ TOURISM
No change on visas: Canada
Canada welcomes Taiwanese tourists with open arms but has no plans to change its visa policy for Taiwanese nationals, the Canadian Trade Office in Taiwan (CTOT) said on Thursday. Taiwan has called on Canada to provide visa-free treatment for Taiwanese nationals, saying that Canada should follow Japan's example, which lifted all visa requirements for Taiwanese tourists on March 11 last year. A local newspaper reported that Canada had decided against waiving visa requirements because of security concerns, worrying that some Chinese would enter Canada illegally using counterfeit Taiwanese passports. CTOT officials declined to comment on the news report, saying only that Taiwanese tourists are welcome in Canada as long as they follow the standard visa application procedures.
■ HEALTH
Banned chemicals found
One of 240 randomly tested vegetable samples contained residues of chemicals that are banned by the WHO for agricultural purposes, Hsieh Ting-hung (謝定宏), deputy director of the Bureau of Food and Drug Analysis, said yesterday. The banned chemicals are dicrotophos and fipronil, which are used to exterminate insect parasites on leafy vegetables, he said. The residual level for dicrotophos was recorded at 0.23ppm, exceeding the suggested acceptable daily intake (ADI) set by Japanese food authorities at 0.000066 mg/kg body weight per day, while the residual level for fipronil was 0.2ppm, surpassing the suggested ADI set by experts on pesticide residues in food and the environment at 0.0002 mg/kg body weight per day. Excessive levels of dicrotophos might cause people to lose their balance, while a high intake of fipronil might lead to liver poisoning and thyrotoxicosis, Hsieh said.
■ CONSTRUCTION
Southern metropolis planned
The Ministry of the Interior yesterday introduced a plan to forge a southern metropolitan area through the development of five major southern cities and counties. The plan aims to capitalize on the region's dual advantages -- its unique culture and marine industry -- to promote development in the area, an official with the ministry's Construction and Planning Agency said. Designed by the nonprofit Institute for Physical Planning and Information, the plan listed 10 major areas of investment needed to create the envisioned new metropolitan area. They include renovating the area's seaports and airports, strengthening the network linking industry and academia, and promoting better water resources management. Officials responsible for construction projects in the five cities and counties featured in the plan took part in the seminar yesterday.
Liya Chu (朱如茵), whose parents are New York-based Taiwanese restaurateurs, has been crowned the champion of US television cooking competition MasterChef Junior, after wowing the judges, including celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, with a feast of fusion cuisine. In the finale of the show’s eighth season, broadcast on Thursday, Chu walked away with US$100,000 after serving a spread of spiced duck breast with scallion pancakes and miso eggplant, followed by coconut pandan panna cotta with a passion fruit coulis and sesame tuille. Chu, who was 10 years old at the time of filming three years ago, faced off against then-11-year-old Grayson Price from
A university student has gained the spotlight for an interactive map he designed detailing all of China’s military bases and installations throughout the Indo-Pacific region. Soochow University music student Joseph Wen (溫約瑟), who calls himself an amateur military enthusiast, said he created the map to “help people better understand the cross-strait situation.” Wen originally posted the map online on June 14 last year, but it gained greater attention after he mentioned it during an appearance on a China Television talk show. On the show, Wen said he had gathered information on the locations from publicly available Web sites, as
RISK FACTORS: ‘We hope people can cooperate and endure it ... it is possibly the very important last mile,’ Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung said Taiwan’s COVID-19 restrictions and mask regulations are to remain the same next month, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday. The center reported 42,112 new local COVID-19 cases and 85 deaths, saying that the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients has dropped to a new low this month. Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the CECC, said that the center is keeping COVID-19 restrictions and mask regulations the same due to the local virus situation, and an increase in the number of imported cases of the new Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 of SARS-CoV-2, among other risk factors. Easing
Opening-day ticket sales for a horror exhibition at the Tainan Art Museum were suspended twice on Saturday as the show attracted too many visitors. Titled “Ghosts and Hells: The Underworld in Asian art,” the exhibition runs until Oct. 16. It is the local version of a show that debuted at the Musee du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris. It was planned and curated by Julien Rousseau. The Tainan museum said that within an hour of its doors opening, more than 1,000 people had entered the exhibition. By noon, 3,000 physical and virtual tickets had been sold, while the museum had more than 4,000
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