Recent news about Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) plans for vote allocation in the year-end legislative elections for candidates within their own party became a point of contention between the party and its ally the People First Party (PFP) yesterday, with PFP chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) reminding the KMT of the PFP's importance.
The leadership of the two parties initially seemed friendly yesterday with KMT heavyweight and Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) and Soong yesterday appearing together to stump for PFP Legislator Chung Shao-ho's (鍾紹和) re-election run in Kaohsiung County. Despite handshakes between the two, Soong's comments at the rally revealed that he did not consider the KMT to be cooperating with the PFP.
"Speaker Wang's math is very good. He knows that for the pan-blue alliance to win a majority of seats in the legislative elections, the KMT and the PFP have to be added together in order for there to be a majority," Soong said yesterday.
For the pan-blue alliance to capture a majority in the year-end legislative elections, the KMT and its ally the PFP must together win over 113 seats in the 225-seat legislature. KMT Organization and Development Affairs Director-General Liao Feng-te (廖風德) said yesterday that the party expects 54 to 58 of its 74 candidates to win seats in the Dec. 11 elections. The PFP has 41 candidates running in the elections.
"There are some people in the KMT that are not willing to allocate votes with the PFP. These people are still not clear about their position. Does this mean that calls for cooperation were just lies?" Soong asked.
Taipei City Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) also commented about the KMT's plans yesterday. According to Ma, the most important issue now is cross-party endorsements for pan-blue legislative candidates, and not vote allocation plans.
There is still one month until the elections. The KMT will focus on how to best allocate votes between candidates, Ma said.
The Taipei City mayor was nearly hit with an egg yesterday while stumping for KMT legislative candidate Lin Hung-chih (林鴻池).
While shaking hands with voters in a market with Lin, an unidentified woman tossed an egg at the mayor from behind, but missed.
Ma took the incident in stride, saying it must be a campaign side-effect of the competition between the KMT and the Democratic Progressive Party.
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