Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday said he will meet with Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) by next week in an effort to seek Wang's cooperation as soon as possible.
"I was nominated by the party as the presidential candidate. The Ma-Wang meeting should not be delayed any longer," Ma said yesterday in an interview with TVBS.
Pledging to meet with Wang by next week, Ma said he would like to carry out his promise to invite Wang to be his running mate, and sort out the issue as soon as possible.
"I think the [Ma-Wang ticket] issue is not what people care about the most. I hope to visit Speaker Wang as soon as possible," he said.
After expressing confidence about his chances of winning the presidential election next year, Ma then criticized the four Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential hopefuls.
Voters will support the candidate who demonstrates honesty and political ability, he said.
"Premier Su Tseng-chang (
Ma also used the occasion to reiterate the KMT's stance that Taiwan maintain its status quo and that the party would prioritize the nation's economy.
"The KMT does not support Taiwan independence, and we will not choose the option of Taiwan independence," he said.
If elected president, Ma said he would take advantage of his "Taipei experience" as former Taipei mayor and build a better Taiwan.
"I believe I will not lose the election to any other candidate," he added.
Ma is expected to decide on his running mate before his candidacy is formally announced during the KMT's national convention on June 24.
In response to Ma's remarks, Wang said he was willing to meet with Ma next week.
But he said he had no idea what Ma wanted to talk to him about in the meeting, and he himself hadn't thought of issues to exchange ideas with Ma on.
"He [Ma] has been telling me that the KMT has to decide on the party's presidential ticket as soon as possible as the DPP [Democratic Progressive Party] will soon determine its candidates, but I told him that there is no hurry on this," Wang told the press yesterday.
Additional reporting by Shih Hsiu-chuan
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS