Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) said yesterday he would meet with Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) next week to discuss the gift of two pandas to Taipei City.
Hau refused to confirm the date of the meeting when asked whether he would accompany former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Lien Chan (連戰) on a visit to the ARATS leader.
The Chinese-language United Daily News reported that Lien would meet Chen on Thursday during a ceremony to formally announce that Beijing will send the two giant pandas it had promised to the Taipei City Zoo.
Lien would represent Taiwan in accepting the two pandas, the paper said.
The zoo would give Beijing Formosan sika deer and Formosan serow in return, the newspaper said.
Hau said the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) and ARATS were arranging the meeting and Chen might visit the zoo.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taipei City councilors condemned Hau for pandering to China and Chen, and helping the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) by refusing to grant rally permits to the DPP in front of the Grand Hotel on Thursday and Friday.
Taipei City Police Department Commissioner Hung Sheng-kung (洪勝坤) said the department refused the DPP a rally permit to prevent clashes.
DPP Taipei City Councilor Chuang Ruei-hsiung (莊瑞雄) said that he would lead more than 100 supporters to protest against Chen by hiking to the rear of the hotel to light firecrackers as a protest.
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,