Taipei Park and Street Lights Office Director Huang Li-yuan (黃立遠) yesterday apologized to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taipei City Councilor Hsu Shu-hua (許淑華) for blaming her for the rejection of a flower planting project.
Accompanied by Taipei City Government Secretary-General Chang Jer-yang (張哲揚), Huang went to the Taipei City Council to apologize to her.
“I have come to apologize to Councilor Hsu Shu-hua for causing her trouble,” he told reporters. “I represent myself and apologize for my own miscognition or misunderstanding.”
The uproar was sparked by media reports that said Huang on Sunday had blamed Hsu for the rejection of his office’s proposed budget for planting azaleas when he talked with Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) as Ko attended the opening of Yang Ming Shan Flower Festival.
Huang said the rejection was an exercise in political manipulation, and Ko had responded with a swear word and suggested that Huang scold Hsu, the reports said.
Ko yesterday said that reporters must have secretly recorded a private conversation he had as he toured the park, adding that he and Huang sometimes said “even nastier words.”
Asked if he had overreacted because Hsu was a member of the former DPP New Tide Faction, Ko said: “Why do you ask when you know the answer?”
“I feel like I am having an allergic reaction when I hear those three words [New Tide faction],” he added later.
The faction caused a lot of harm to the nation and the DPP is now suffering the consequences, as the faction considers its own gains as more important than the party’s, he said.
The faction is “a disaster to the nation,” he said.
“I feel sad and upset that we are being called ‘political manipulators’ when we are diligently supervising the city government’s budget proposal,” Hsu told reporters yesterday.
Huang was the one doing the manipulating by complaining about her to Ko, she said.
She had only asked why, if the office had already allocated a large budget for planning flowers, it was asking for more to plant azaleas, she said.
The Taipei City Council passed the budget proposal after making cuts, she 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
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,