A national campaign club in support of former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Ma Ying-jeou's (馬英九) presidential bid was launched in Taipei yesterday.
The club, named the "A-jeou Support Network" (阿九後援會), was formed by 46 KMT city and county councilors with the goal of helping Ma win next year's presidential election.
Placing the syllable "a" in front of the last word of a person's given name indicates familiarity with that person.
Ma attended a ceremony to launch the club yesterday, and enthusiasm filled the venue as he arrived.
In his brief remarks to his supporters, Ma restated that he would pursue economic development, closer ties with China and establishing a corruption-free bureaucracy if elected.
After his remarks, Ma handed a battle banner with the character "Ma" to each of the 46 club organizers.
"Ma's victory will keep Taiwan going!" participants shouted like a battle cry as they accepted the flags from Ma.
Ma has put each of the organizers in charge of developing local chapters.
"Although there are only 46 of us in the organization, we will recruit new blood from around the nation," a participant said.
The organizers hope especially to attract young blood to the party. All the current members are under the age of 40. Local councilors are important assets for a presidential candidate, as they usually help influence community leaders.
Ma announced his bid to run for the presidency on Feb. 13, after being indicted on the same day for allegedly misusing a special allowance fund during his time as Taipei mayor.
Although Legislative Yuan Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (
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
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
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