Staff reporter
Responding to comments made by People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong about party defectors earlier in the day, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) reiterated that his party has never encouraged any PFP members to join the KMT, while continuing to stress the importance of pan-blue unity.
"The KMT is also walking the middle course. The KMT and PFP have the same origins and we share similar ideas ? I think all pan-blue members agree that pan-blue cooperation is vital," Ma said yesterday during the Taipei city government's New Year gathering at the city hall.
At a time when many of the ruling party's policies have failed to respond to the concerns of the people and have even started panic, Ma said, it is the responsibility of the opposition parties to cooperate and stabilize social unease by answering the public's expectations.
While Ma has repeatedly denied having problematic relations with the PFP in the wake of a mass exodus of PFP members to the KMT, an awkward atmosphere has developed between the two parties as the political future of the PFP is facing an increasingly crucial test with more members expected to leave soon for the KMT.
Ma certainly felt the awkwardness yesterday when he declined to eat an orange offered him by the Taipei City council deputy speaker and PFP member Lee Hsin (李新) during a visit to the Taipei city council's New Year party. Orange is the PFP's party color.
"I should not eat any oranges for the time being. We need to respect [the orange]," he said.
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