Leaders of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-People First Party (PFP) alliance refused to say yesterday whether they would accept the result of a recount.
The parties' leaders met yesterday to discuss a possible meeting with President Chen Shui-bian (
"We have received a call from the Presidential Office about the meeting," PFP Secretary-General Tsai Chung-hsiung (
On Saturday night, Chen said he had agreed to demands by KMT Chairman Lien Chan (
Chen said the meeting could take place today without any preconditions following consultations between his chief staff and that of Lien and Soong.
"We will talk over with our KMT counterpart how to reach a consensus on this matter," Tsai said prior to meeting with his KMT counterpart at KMT headquarters yesterday afternoon.
As of press time, the alliance had yet to announce its response concerning the meeting.
Earlier yesterday, Presidential Office spokesman James Huang (
Huang added that the Presidential Office has set no conditions on where or when the meeting may take place.
KMT Secretary-General Lin Fong-cheng (林豐正) said that the alliance's demands are simple: an immediate recount of the March 20 vote, the assembly of a special task force to investigate the March 19 assassination attempt against Chen and a probe of the activation of the national security mechanism after the shooting.
Lien, who lost to Chen by a margin of less than 30,000 votes, has refused to concede defeat, alleging voting irregularities, for which he has not provided evidence, and raising questions about Chen's gunshot wound.
Lien's previous appeal to the Taiwan High Court for a recount was rejected on Wednesday on the grounds that the Central Election Commission (CEC) had not yet officially declared Chen the winner.
While Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), a KMT vice chairman and the manager of the alliance's national campaign team, said during the rally on Saturday that the result of a recount should be accepted, alliance spokesman Alex Tsai (蔡正元), at a press conference later Saturday, refused to say whether Lien and Soong would accept the result.
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