Several civil rights groups yesterday called on the Chinese government to free jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), and urged President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to include human rights issues in cross-strait negotiations.
The Ma administration should also invite Liu and his wife to visit Taiwan and offer the couple political asylum, they said.
“The Ma administration should urge the Chinese government to release Liu immediately and include the two civil rights that are enshrined in two UN conventions as an agenda in the sixth round of cross-strait negotiations,” Lai Chung-chiang (賴中強), convener of the Cross-Strait Agreements Watch Alliance, told a press conference held in Taipei.
Taipei Society director Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) said the peace prize highlighted Chinese government repression and the Ma administration should address the issue while pursuing close cross-strait ties.
The groups’ call came days -before the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony, which will be held on Friday in Norway. It remains unknown whether the prize will be handed out as scheduled because China is still imprisoning Liu and is unlikely to allow his family to attend the ceremony.
The Chinese government -sentenced Liu to 11 years in prison for subversion after he co-authored an appeal calling for political reforms in China. His wife, Liu Xia (劉霞), has been under house arrest since the award was announced in October.
Later this month, the Straits Exchange Foundation and its Chinese counterpart, the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, are set to hold the sixth round of cross-strait talks in Taipei to sign an investment protection agreement and a separate pact on medical and hygiene cooperation.
The upcoming cross-strait negotiations and any future cross-strait exchanges, the groups said, should abide by democratic principles and include mention of human rights and personal liberties.
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