The review meeting to approve the Public Television Service’s (PTS) fifth board of directors failed once again yesterday, with Minister of Culture Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) saying the result was “sorrowful” and demonstrated that requiring three-fourths of the review committee to approve a prospective board member was an unreasonably high threshold.
Lung said the ministry had done its best to push through amendments to the Public Television Act (公共電視法), including lowering the approval threshold from three-fourths to one-half.
Only three board members and two supervisors were approved at yesterday’s review meeting, the third of its kind so far.
Photo: CNA
The three new board members are Chen Hsin-hung (陳信宏) — commonly known as Ashin (阿信), the lead singer of pop-rock band Mayday — PC Home chairman Jan Hung-tze (詹宏志) and Pegatron Corp chairman Tung Tsu-hsien (童子賢).
The two supervisors that were approved are Chou Ling-tai (周玲臺), a professor at National Chengchi University’s Department of Accounting, and Ku Ling-ling (谷玲玲), a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at National Taiwan University.
Lung said the ministry would not be able to recommend a new nominee list in the near future.
Five board members and one supervisor were approved one-and-a-half years ago, but approving only three board members and two supervisors from a list of 14 board nominees and four supervisor nominees means that PTS’s fifth board of directors still cannot be established, Lung said.
“I feel very sorry and sorrowful [about the situation],” she said.
Lung said the reason she felt sorry because PTS “is a television broadcaster that belongs to all citizens and taxpayers, but civil society is being made to tolerate a law [referring to the Public Television Act (公共電視法)] that allows a few people to paralyze the implementation of a public service.”
By contrast, the approval threshold for Council of Grand Justice members is only 50 percent, so it is unreasonable that the unpaid board of directors for the PTS needs a higher approval threshold of three-fourths, Lung said, adding that if the act is not amended, the result of the next review meeting would probably be similarly disappointing.
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