Obstacles impeding the pan-blue camp's plan to join forces as a "league" would not have a bearing on the choice of candidates for the December legislative elections, Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
"[The pan-blue camp] has been working on its nomination procedures, and these have nothing to do with whether or not there will be an opposition league," said Ma, who is also a vice chairman of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
Ma was referring to a scheme in which the KMT and its allies, the People First Party (PFP) and the New Party, would allow each party to nominate a fixed number of candidates in each constituency to prevent them from splitting the pan-blue vote.
Ma said that the pan-blue camp had reached consensus on how it would divide up nominations in a majority of the constituencies, and that only a small number of constituencies still required work.
Ma was attempting to brush off speculation that the pan-blue camp's nomination scheme would fall apart if it could not form a league prior to the elections in December.
The idea of forming a league drawing together all opposition forces was floated by PFP Chairman James Soong (
The pan-blue alliance is hoping that it can jointly nominate a list of legislators-at-large, an idea that has met with official objections given that the alliance is not a single party, and unease within the KMT's rank and file.
While the idea of forming a league received immediate endorsement from the New Party, Lien stressed that "a merger between the KMT and the PFP remains the ultimate goal" of his party.
not feasible
Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) said on Wednesday that it was not feasible for the pan-blue camp to jointly nominate legislators-at-large according to electoral regulations.
Former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairman Shih Ming-teh (
Hsu has sided with the pan-blue camp since his split with the DPP in 1999.
Some members of the KMT, who have voiced reservations about forming a league, accused Hsu of attempting to use the KMT's resources to gain himself a spot on the list of legislators-at-large nominees.
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