A day after his election as a Greater Kaohsiung City councilor, former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) son spoke about his jailed father and an alliance of municipal council members who insist that Taiwan and China are separate countries.
Chen Chih-chung (陳致中), 31, won 32,947 votes, more than any other candidate running in the Greater Kaohsiung City Council election on Saturday.
As a member of the new “one side, one country” alliance, a political group dedicated to promoting Taiwan’s independence, Chen Chih-chung claimed that victory for him and other like-minded candidates signified an endorsement by voters.
More than 30 members of the alliance won council seats in the election, with nearly one-third becoming councilors in Greater Tainan, a municipality merging Tainan City and Tainan County.
Most members of the alliance are also members of the Democratic Progressive Party.
Chen Chih-chung attributed his big win to voters’ support for his father and said he would fight “for his father’s innocence.”
Earlier this month, the former president and his wife were each sentenced by the Supreme Court to a total of 19 years in jail on a series of corruption charges.
The younger Chen has his own share of legal problems. In a money-laundering case, he was sentenced by a higher court in June to 14 months in prison and fined NT$30 million (US$937,500). His appeal is pending in the Supreme Court. In July a tabloid magazine linked Chen Chih-chung to a prostitute. Although Chen filed libel lawsuits against the magazine and a rival politician, a district court ruled against him in both cases.
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,