Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) went back out on the campaign trail yesterday, heading to coastal areas of central Taiwan and the south.
Beginning in Changhua County, a five-day campaign tour will take Tsai and her entourage along Highway No. 17, also known as the Western Coastal Highway, and on to the counties of Yunlin and Chiayi, as well as Greater Tainan and Greater Kaohsiung.
“The coastal areas Tsai will visit are the regions that developed the earliest in Taiwan’s history,” DPP spokesperson Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) said.
“However, after all these years they are the lesser-developed areas,” he said.
“Tsai wants to address this issue and listen to what local people have to say,” he said.
The region is rich in its religious culture and faith in Matsu, the Taoist goddess of the sea, as well as its fishing and aquaculture industry, he said.
Underemployment, underdevelopment, stagnant local economies and perennial flooding in lowland areas are also among the issues Tsai would address during her trip, as well as campaigning for the DPP’s legislative candidates in various districts, he said.
As for the first nationally televised presidential debate on Saturday, Tsai believed she had performed “pretty well,” Chen said.
While in Changhua yesterday, Tsai met Tianjhong Township (田中) Mayor Cheng Chun-hsiung (鄭俊雄), a member of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
Asked about the unusual meeting, Cheng said he was willing to meet anyone who cares about local development and he was not afraid of being reprimanded by the KMT for his meeting with Tsai.
He told reporters that he has been disappointed at the Changhua County Government’s lack of action on improving local infrastructure.
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