Although Taitung Council Speaker Wu Chun-li (
Wu, of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), who ran for the top job in Taitung County as an independent candidate, received 62,189 votes in Saturday's polls, triumphing over his rival, Taitung Deputy Commissioner Liu Chuan-hao (劉櫂豪), who also ran as an independent and received 40,173 votes.
Wu is currently Taitung Council Speaker.
The Ministry of Interior is likely to issue a suspension order when Wu assumes office on Dec. 27.
Wu and the KMT have said they will launch a legal battle against the order.
Wu was charged with corruption while serving as a Taitung County councilor in 1999.
Taitung District Court in 2002 sentenced him to 16 years in prison, but the Taiwan High Court's Hualien branch in 2003 reduced that sentence to seven years and eight months in jail.
Wu has appealed the ruling.
The Ministry of Interior has said that according to the Law on Local Government Systems (
The interior ministry also previously said that "if Wu is elected on Dec. 3, he must be suspended from his post in accordance with the law."
Minister of Justice Morley Shih (
Wu faces other difficulties. He was charged with vote-buying a few days before the elections, and was released on NT$1 million (US$29,800) bail.
Wu yesterday said that "there is no issue of suspension" because the Law and Local Government Systems applies mayors or commissioners, but the corruption lawsuit he faces occurred when he was a Taichung county councilor.
"As such, the law does not apply to me," he said.
Wu also said that the justice system would prove him innocent.
Wu's campaign headquarters said that Wu would be willing to run for the post again in a by-election.
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