Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) Chairman Huang Kun-huei (黃昆輝) yesterday voiced his support for an anti-casino campaign, vowing that his party would do everything to boycott the passage of a bill on creating casino resorts on the nation’s outlying islands.
“Legalizing gambling is a very serious issue that would have a profound impact on our society,” Huang said during a meeting yesterday with members of the Alliance Against the Legalization of Gambling at the party’s headquarters in Taipei.
“It’s quite worrisome that the government is trying to push through a bill to allow establishing casinos on outlying islands,” Huang added.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
“The TSU will do everything it can to prevent the bill from being passed in the Legislative Yuan,” Huang added.
Huang said it is equally worried about some universities offering courses related to gambling.
“[These courses] are the downfall of universities, this is education without soul,” he added.
Citing Singapore as an example, alliance convener Shih Chao-hui (釋昭慧) said that while the city-state’s government had put strict regulations in place to prevent Singaporeans from going into a casino resort it opened a few years ago, “statistics still show that Singaporeans make up the majority of guests at the casino resort.”
“Looking at Singapore’s experience, it is clear that the objective of attracting foreign tourists instead of local residents is a lie,” Shih said.
Wang Hua-ti, a retired junior-high school principal from Matsu, said that most educators in Matsu are against casinos, “because if the casino proposal is approved, we wouldn’t know how to teach our students about moral values, or how to explain to students why gambling is illegal elsewhere in the country, but legal in Matsu.”
Kam Ka-ho (甘家豪), a Macanese student studying in Taiwan, said that while casinos may be an important source of tax income for the Macau government and a major tourist attraction, “most Macanese have no hope for the future because working in casinos seems to be the only job available to us.”
He added that many Macanese young people are giving up higher education because they can find jobs at casino which do not require higher education, and even some teachers are quitting their jobs to work in a casino.
“I am also a victim of the casino industry; my father lost all the money he planned to use to buy a house for the family in just one night at a casino,” Kam said.
“In fact, many families are having a lot of problems now as many parents work in casinos and have no time to look after their children,” Kam added.
TSU Policy and Publicity director Chow Mei-li (周美里) assured the anti-casino activists that the TSU will have more meetings with them to develop strategies against the bill on gambling, and promised that the party would stand firmly with them on the issue.
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,