Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Frank Hsieh (
While Ma yesterday described Hsieh as the "head of the secret service" for coming up with a series of allegations against him, Hsieh said he did not deserve the title because he did not torture Ma to force him to reveal his own irregularities.
"Ma puts himself in an embarrassing situation because he does not tell the truth," Hsieh said. "He should do some soul searching of his own."
PHOTO: LO PEI-DER, TAIPEI TIMES
The Hsieh camp yesterday continued to pressure Ma to explain whether he had taken bribes from an architect's association in exchange for revising a renovation code in their favor.
Chiu Yi-ying (邱議瑩), a Hsieh camp spokesperson, claimed that Ma accepted NT$500,000 from Taipei City's Association of Architects in 1998 when Ma was city mayor and a renovation code was amended in 2001 in favor of architects.
Chiu asked Ma to offer a clear account on whether there was any connection between the two.
Shen Fa-hui (
Another Hsieh spokesperson Hsieh Hsin-ni (
Hsieh Hsin-ni said she would like to know whether Ma's wealth had anything to do with the "outstanding" ability of financial management of his wife, Chow Mei-ching (
While the Ma camp admitted that Chow did sell some shares of Mega Financial Holdings (兆豐金控) between July 13, 2004, and Sept. 13, 2004, Hsieh Hsin-ni said that she would like to know why the timing was so perfect that the share prices had gone back up again since Chow sold the stocks.
"I think she deserves the title `the 2008 queen of stocks,'" Hsieh Hsin-ni said.
In response, Ma spokesman Lo Chih-chiang (
In related developments, the Hsieh camp yesterday also questioned the relationship between Beijing and a Taiwanese business association, saying that the association is staffed with high-ranking Chinese officials.
Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴), a Hsieh camp spokesperson, said the Association of Taiwan Investment Enterprises on the Mainland was ostensibly is an organization serving China-based Taiwanese businesspeople but in fact is controlled by the Chinese government.
Hsiao said the honorary chairman of the association is Chen Yunlin (陳雲林), director of the Chinese State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO). The vice chairman and secretary-general is He Shizhong (何世忠), director of TAO's Economic Bureau, Hsiao said.
Two of the association's advisors are Zheng Lizhong (鄭立中), deputy director of the TAO, and Li Bingcai (李炳才), standing deputy director of China's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, she said.
Hsiao said China's attempt to interfere in Taiwan's election is apparent because flight discounts have been offered to China-based Taiwanese businesspeople returning home between March 1 and March 22, the day of the presidential election.
Hsieh said in Kaohsiung yesterday that those who found offering flight discounts to eligible voters returning home to vote for specific candidates would run the risk of breaking the law if such an incident happened in Taiwan.
Ma, at a separate setting yesterday, said China ought to be condemned if its intervention in Taiwan's presidential election were found to be true.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY STAFF WRITER
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