The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could discipline or expel several city councilors who did not follow the official party line during the local speaker elections on Saturday, a spokesperson said yesterday.
Although the DPP made history by electing one speaker and two deputy speakers in the five special municipality councils — its most impressive showing to date — party officials said they could punish members who failed to vote for the official nominees.
“We asked many times for all DPP city councilors to abide by their caucus decisions and to vote within caucus guidelines,” DPP spokesperson Tsai Chi-chang (蔡其昌) said. “Those who did not abide by this resolution will be disciplined accordingly.”
PHOTO: GEORGE TSORNG, TAIPEI TIMES
The severity of the matter reflects efforts by the DPP to curb runaway ballots, or votes cast against official party nominees. The problem was likely the cause of the DPP’s loss in the Greater Kaohsiung’s speaker seat, where it trailed by three votes despite holding parity support.
Party officials said they would likely deal severely with newly elected New Taipei City Councilor Adrean Lee (李婉鈺), who cast a vote for herself, saying she was too nervous. While unlikely to be stripped of her party membership, she will likely see her party privileges revoked for a few years.
Lee, who was involved in a recent controversy over an adultery scandal, has since had the party whip withdrawn.
“We will make a decision [on Lee] during our Central Standing Committee meeting on Wednesday,” Tsai said. “Both the New Taipei City [(新北市), the proposed name of the upgraded Taipei County] caucus and the local DPP chapter have recommended that we also revoke her party membership.”
It will be more difficult for the DPP to enforce discipline elsewhere, because the speaker elections were held by secret ballot and party officials are uncertain which councilors failed to toe the party line.
Tsai said the DPP would request that the party caucuses in Greater Tainan and Greater Kaohsiung conduct an investigation and make recommendations to the Central Standing Committee.
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