KMT officials yesterday confirmed that New Party and independent Taipei City Council deputies have contacted the KMT with the intention of "returning to the fold."
Ting Shou-chung (
In addition, there are some who wished simply to maintain a cooperative relationship with the KMT in the campaign, Ting added.
Ting said his office is still evaluating these cases and has not made a decision as to how it will deal with them.
The impact on the KMT's campaign and the potential of these politicians are two elements in the evaluation, because as incumbents, they will enjoy advantages in their re-election bids, Ting said.
As the KMT will only start accepting registrations from members interested in running for Taipei City County deputies on June 24, it probably will need to wait until July to offer a clearer answer as to whether the politicians will be permitted to rejoin the party, Ting said.
He said the KMT "is an open-minded party and hopes to cooperate with like-minded friends to create a favorable situation for the `pan-blue' camp."
If the KMT, PFP and New Party offer too many candidates competing for similar support bases, they could suffer severe setbacks in the races, Ting said.
KMT Secretary-General Lin Fong-cheng (
The New Party's survival has been seriously threatened since the foundation of the PFP and it won only a single seat in last December's legislative polls.
Also yesterday, a group of over 30 recipients of the KMT-sponsored Dr. Sun Yat-sen scholarship decided to gather other recipients with KMT membership to throw their full support behind Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou's (馬英九) re-election bid and the KMT's yet-to-be announced candidate for Kaohsiung mayor.
A total of 171 people -- including Ma -- have supported their post-graduate studies overseas with the scholarship over past decades.
Other prominent recipients have been P.K. Chiang (江丙坤), vice speaker of the Legislative Yuan; Chao Shou-po (趙守博), chairman of the Chinese Broadcasting Corporation; former DPP Chairman Hsu Hsin-liang (許信良); DPP legislator Chang Chun-hung (張俊宏); and PFP legislator Pang Chien-kuo.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching