Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin’s (郝龍斌) spokespersons yesterday accused Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) of not taking action to improve the nation’s airports when he was in the Cabinet, saying they wanted him to detail his policies as the Democratic Progressive Party’s candidate for city mayor.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Pan Wei-kang (潘維剛) said she never saw Su do anything for the newly renamed Taipei International Airport (the old Songshan airport) aside from seeing off former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) when he was premier.
During Su’s tenure as premier, Pan said he inspected the airport and found the 57-year-old runway was too old, but Su did nothing to improve it before stepping down.
PHOTO: LIN CHENG-KUNG, TAIPEI TIMES
“Songshan airport became a third-class airport because nothing was done,” Pan said.
Nor did Su take any action to improve conditions at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, except for changing its name from Chiang Kai-shek International Airport in 2006, Pan said.
Comparing Su and Hau, KMT Legislator Alex Tsai (蔡正元) said Hau has opened two new aviation routes in the past four years, including direct flights between Taipei International Airport and Hongqiao International Airport in Shanghai in June and between Taipei and Tokyo’s Haneda Airport on Sunday.
Direct flights between Taipei International and Gimpo International Airport in Seoul will also be launched next year, he said.
Tsai said Su did not make any substantial contributions to Songshan airport except for shooting campaign promotional videos at Tokyo and Seoul airports.
“I think he’s better suited to playing the role of airport spokesperson than mayor,” Tsai said.
Another spokesman for Hau, KMT Legislator Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞), said the Nov. 27 election was a choice between the DPP’s policy of “locking up the country” and the KMT’s policy of reform and opening up.
“Some have criticized Songshan irport as a dinosaur, but the reason why we are altering a suit when wearing one is because of the DPP’s policy,” he said.
KMT Legislator Alex Fai (費鴻泰) said Hau had delivered on his campaign promise of improving the city’s traffic and connecting Taipei with the world.
With direct flights between Taipei International and Haneda and those between Taipei International and Gimpo next year, Fai said a “golden aviation route of Northeast Asia” would be created, bringing more foreign visitors.
Another spokeswoman, KMT Legislator Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), said Su had not proposed any vision or concrete policies for the city since annoucing his candidacy.
She said she wondered whether Su would change the name of Taipei International Airport if he were elected.
Su dismissed the accusations as baseless political attacks and said he would not respond to them.
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