The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday questioned the source of funding for the Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) election advertisements, saying it suspected the party of financing its campaign with stolen assets.
Hsieh Hsin-ni (
Hsieh estimated that a KMT ad that appeared on the Chinese-language Apple Daily for 43 consecutive days cost more than NT$30 million (US$937,500) -- rather than the NT$10 million the KMT had claimed.
DPP presidential candidate Frank Hsieh's (
Hsieh Hsin-ni also asked the KMT to offer a clear account on how many of its members had posed as ordinary people in the ads to criticize the government. The DPP accused the KMT's deputy party director in Pingtung County of posing as the owner of a breakfast shop in one of the TV commercials to complain about the economy.
In Kaohsiung County, President Chen Shui-bian (
Chen pledged that the stolen assets reclaimed from the KMT, which he claimed are worth more than NT$200 billion, would be used to finance five educational programs.
They are to offer free kindergarten education, free textbooks for elementary and junior-high school students, free lunches for elementary and junior-high school students, free tuition for junior high school and junior vocational school students and interest-free loans to college students and young business entrepreneurs.
Describing the KMT as an "irrational" opposition party, Chen criticized the KMT's objections to the referendum proposal as a means to protect its dubious properties.
The president also urged the KMT to keep the public in mind by passing the government budget for next year, as well as unfreezing the rest of this year's budget.
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
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