President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) must stop sugar-coating the ugly truth behind Taiwan's sluggish economy and reshuffle the Cabinet, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said yesterday in the wake of the government's announcement that first-quarter GDP shrank by 10.24 percent.
Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) figures showed that the economy contracted at a record pace in the first quarter because of plummeting exports, prompting the government to trim its GDP forecast for this year to a decline of 4.25 percent.
The most worrisome element about the figure is “the worst is yet to come,” DPP caucus whip Lee Chun-yi (李俊毅) said, adding that he was concerned the Executive Yuan was deflating the real number in a bid to buttress Ma's popularity.
DPP Legislator Pan Meng-an (潘孟安) lambasted Ma's consumer voucher program, saying it was a complete flop because it failed to boost the economy as the Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD) predicted.
DPP Legislator Huang Wei-cher (黃偉哲) said instead of making good on his “6-3-3” pledge — an annual economic growth of 6 percent, a per capita income of US$30,000 and an unemployment rate of less than 3 percent by 2012, Ma appeared to be pushing a “10-10-6” policy — a 10 percent GDP decline, the nation's global competiveness falling by 10 places and a jobless rate of nearly 6 percent.
The DPP caucus called on Ma to overhaul his Cabinet and replace it with economic experts.
“Ma is quite amazing. He was able to ruin Taiwan's economy in one year. This is something that the DPP or the old Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime was not able to accomplish,”Lee Chun-yi 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