Protesters marched against New Power Party (NPP) Executive Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) yesterday in New Taipei City’s Sijhih District (汐止), as efforts to recall the legislator continued.
Setting off from Sijhih Railway Station, hundreds of protesters in white shirts slowed traffic as they wound their way to Huang’s local office, pausing there briefly before returning to the station while calling for Huang to step down.
“This is a democratic war,” Greater Taipei Stability Power Alliance chairman Sun Chi-cheng (孫繼正) said.
“Have voters ever given Huang the authority to push for homosexual marriage? He is ignoring public opinion,” alliance secretary-general, Yu Hsin-yi (游信義) said, adding that he needed to “listen and change his arrogant attitude.”
Yu is a former legislative candidate for the Faith and Hope League, a party opposing marriage equality that did not win seats in last year’s elections.
Sun said Huang brought “disorder” to society in debates over new labor rules and the service trade agreement with China.
There has been a movement since December last year to recall Huang over his support for marriage equality, shortly after the passage of amendments to the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法) that lowered recall thresholds.
Activists passed the first stage petition signature threshold to begin the recall process within the same month and now must collect another 25,119 signatures before a recall vote could be held.
“We are still collecting signatures and hope that today’s large event can help us break through,” Sun said, estimating that the organizers are about 10,000 signatures short of the next threshold.
At a separate news conference celebrating the first anniversary of the NPP’s Hsinchu headquarters, Huang said his support for marriage equality was “unshakeable.”
“Supporting marriage equality has always been my stance as a legal scholar, and I made an open promise on the issue during the legislative elections,” 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
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,