The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday traded barbs over who should be held responsible for the breakdown in negotiations over televised debates between the mayoral candidates in next month’s special municipality elections.
The parties failed to reach a consensus after the KMT insisted on inviting media representatives to ask questions during the debate.
Questioning the DPP’s sincerity in holding debates, KMT spokesman Su Jun-pin (蘇俊賓) yesterday urged DPP Chairperson Tsai --Ing-wen (蔡英文) to keep an open mind and allow civic groups to participate in the debates.
“We don’t understand the DPP and Chairperson Tsai’s insistence. The KMT really hopes the debates can be held before the elections,” Su said, adding that the KMT and its five mayoral candidates are willing to participate in the debates, and that the party would be “flexible” in the process of negotiations on the debate format.
“The DPP should not act like an ironing board: refusing to -communicate,” Su said.
Speaking against the latest -accusations, DPP spokesperson Tsai Chi-chang (蔡其昌) said the “facts speak for themselves,” -pointing to a copy of the meeting records released by the party.
“The KMT had simply backtracked on what was initially agreed upon,” he said. “The last thing we are concerned about is the media, but we do insist that the [negotiations] be held equally and fairly.”
The records from the four meetings reveal that the KMT negotiating team led by party spokesperson Chen Shu-jung (陳淑蓉) had changed its viewpoints on a number of key issues that the DPP representatives apparently weren’t able to accept.
On Monday, KMT negotiators suggested that their best efforts to convince Taipei City Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) to accept the previously agreed debate format had failed. Instead, Hau insisted that media representatives be allowed to pose questions.
“[The KMT] hopes that the DPP will be able to treat Taipei City separately to the other four cities [up for elections next month], in order to give us more room for further negotiations,” the record read, describing some of the KMT’s viewpoints.
The record is “very clear on this,” DPP Secretary-General Wu Nai-jen (吳乃仁) added, saying that under the circumstances, “how could the KMT say that we don’t want a debate?”
“If we had to backtrack on all our previously agreed-upon points, where would that leave the negotiations?” Wu questioned. “The KMT is making an easy and straightforward issue complicated and it leaves us no room to proceed.”
At a separate setting yesterday, Hau argued that media representatives had been invited to participate in previous debates and his camp simply requested to follow the traditional format in the debate.
“We still want to make the debate happen and I hope the DPP will not try to avoid scrutiny from Taipei residents and from the media,” Hau said.
For his part, Hau’s DPP counterpart Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) blamed the KMT for its flip-flop on the debate format and accused the KMT of intentionally avoiding the debate.
“The KMT had agreed on a cross-examination debate, but changed its mind after reaching consensus with the DPP,” he said. “The KMT is afraid of facing the voters and its move is clearly a violation of democracy.”
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,