The latest poll released by Global Views magazine yesterday showed that 59.6 percent of respondents were not satisfied with President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) performance, while 42.2 percent said they had reservations about the new Cabinet’s performance under Ma’s leadership.
Meanwhile, 42.9 percent of respondents said they have confidence in the new Cabinet, while Ma’s approval rate rose 5.3 percent last month to 28.2 percent, the poll by the magazine’s Survey Research Center showed.
The poll conducted by the magazine last month found that about 80 percent of respondents said the Ma administration had done a poor job in handling the aftermath of Typhoon Morakot, and a majority said a Cabinet reshuffle was necessary.
Ma appointed Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) to form the new Cabinet after former premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) announced his Cabinet would resign on Sept. 7.
Compared with a similar poll last May, which found that more than 64 percent of the respondents said they had confidence in Liu and his Cabinet, the new Cabinet led by Wu suffered from a lack of public confidence.
The pollster said the poll results showed that the public had lower expectations for the new government.
A total of 44.8 percent of the respondents said they were confident about Ma’s performance, while 41.6 percent said they have no confidence in the president.
On cross-strait cooperation, 65.9 percent of the respondents said they pay close attention to the proposed signing of an economic cooperation pact, while 55.8 percent said closer cross-strait economic exchange would help revive the economy in Taiwan.
More than 56 percent of respondents said they were not satisfied with the performance of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) legislators.
The poll was conducted between Monday and Wednesday, with 1,003 residents above 20 years old interviewed.
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
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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
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