As several local governments including Taipei on Friday conditionally lifted a ban on using liquid eggs in school lunches, Taipei City Councilor Yan Juo-fang (顏若芳) yesterday urged the Taipei City Government to apologize to the public and the liquid egg companies affected by the policy.
Due to controversies over the quality and labeling of government-funded imported eggs earlier this year, the local governments, led by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), banned the use of liquid eggs as an ingredient in school lunches in September.
The governments of Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Keelung and Taichung on Friday announced they would conditionally lift the ban tomorrow, but the liquid eggs are required to have a Certified Agricultural Standard (CAS) label.
Photo: Taipei Times file
Yan yesterday posted on her Facebook page that the Taipei City Government should apologize to the public for the food scare and to the law-abiding liquid egg companies that have been affected by its policy, after online commentator Lin Yu-hong (林裕紘) and a former KMT staffer associated with the egg scare were indicted on Friday.
Online commentator Lin, who goes by “Lin Bay Hao You” (Lin Bay好油) on Facebook, had written articles criticizing the central government’s agricultural policies, including egg import controversies earlier this year, but he later admitted faking the death threats over his criticism.
Yen said the central government on Oct. 25 urged the local governments to lift the ban on liquid eggs in school lunches, promising the liquid eggs would be safe because the use of domestic eggs is a requirement for school lunches, but the local governments still insisted on the ban.
After the harm has been inflicted, now the city government suddenly said it has asked the Food and Drug Administration to provide its liquid egg labeling inspection result and confirmed that the manufacturing process and labeling have met the requirements, she said, asking why it took the city government so long to confirm it.
Yen questioned whether the city government was cooperating with the smear campaign toward the Democratic Progressive Party-led central government so it would not lift the ban.
She demanded that the city government apologize for sowing public panic.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS