The New Power Party (NPP) yesterday nominated Taiwan Healthy Air Action Alliance director Jeremy Yang (楊澤民) as its candidate for a March 16 legislative by-election.
Yang is to vie for a legislative seat representing Changhua County’s Lugang (鹿港) and Hemei (和美) townships against former Changhua county commissioner Ko Cheng-fang (柯呈枋) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and former Lugang Township mayor Huang Chen-yen (黃振彥) of the Democratic Progressive Party.
Yang, who has a doctorate in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, has served as an associate professor at National Tsing Hua University’s Department of Chemistry, an engineer at IBM and an engineering manager at the Industrial Technology Research Institute.
Photo: Peter Lo, Taipei Times
He has been the director of the alliance since 2011 and the vice president of the Taiwan 228 Care Association since 2016.
Yang said he is contesting the election because “I could no longer stand and watch.”
While Taiwan has plenty of talent, the economy is stuck in an old development model and pollution is tolerated, he said.
His academic training, experience in industry and environmental activism give him a comprehensive perspective on environmental issues, Yang said.
“I was trained as a scientist, but I am also a pragmatist who has worked at private companies,” he said.
If elected, he would promote environmental conservation to protect the county’s environment and residents’ health using his expertise and experience, Yang said, adding that boosting the economy and caring for the environment do not have to be mutually exclusive.
“I hope to create a healthy environment for the future generations and make Changhua a place where people can realize their dreams so that residents would no longer have to leave home to follow their ambitions,” he said.
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