Former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairman Hsu Hsin-liang (許信良) paid a visit yesterday to DPP presidential candidate Frank Hsieh's (謝長廷) campaign headquarters to show his support before Hsieh was set to appear in the first televised debate with his Chinese National Party (KMT) rival Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).
Hsu's endorsement of Hsieh was as an apparent move away from the pan-blue camp, with which he had been closely associated in the past few years, particularly during the campaign against President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) initiated by former DPP chairman Shih Ming-teh (施明德) in August 2006.
Hsu praised Hsieh's long-term fight in the name of democracy and urged Taiwanese not to allow the KMT to holf a monopoly over politics in Taiwan.
PHOTO: CNA
Hsieh is among the few in the pan-green camp to have espoused rational and practical cross-strait policies, Hsu said, adding that Hsieh's voice as an executive leader would be more powerful than Ma's.
Hsu said he had always liked Hsieh's take on China-Taiwan relations and that while Hsieh and Ma's views on the matter did not differ much, Hsieh's experience as a civil rights activist made him a more competent candidate for democracy than Ma, whose experience Hsu said comes not from practice but from education.
Asked to comment on allegations that Hsieh had served as a informant for the KMT government, Hsu said his own experience of being misunderstood throughout his political life made him empathize with Hsieh.
Liya Chu (朱如茵), whose parents are New York-based Taiwanese restaurateurs, has been crowned the champion of US television cooking competition MasterChef Junior, after wowing the judges, including celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, with a feast of fusion cuisine. In the finale of the show’s eighth season, broadcast on Thursday, Chu walked away with US$100,000 after serving a spread of spiced duck breast with scallion pancakes and miso eggplant, followed by coconut pandan panna cotta with a passion fruit coulis and sesame tuille. Chu, who was 10 years old at the time of filming three years ago, faced off against then-11-year-old Grayson Price from
A university student has gained the spotlight for an interactive map he designed detailing all of China’s military bases and installations throughout the Indo-Pacific region. Soochow University music student Joseph Wen (溫約瑟), who calls himself an amateur military enthusiast, said he created the map to “help people better understand the cross-strait situation.” Wen originally posted the map online on June 14 last year, but it gained greater attention after he mentioned it during an appearance on a China Television talk show. On the show, Wen said he had gathered information on the locations from publicly available Web sites, as
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Opening-day ticket sales for a horror exhibition at the Tainan Art Museum were suspended twice on Saturday as the show attracted too many visitors. Titled “Ghosts and Hells: The Underworld in Asian art,” the exhibition runs until Oct. 16. It is the local version of a show that debuted at the Musee du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris. It was planned and curated by Julien Rousseau. The Tainan museum said that within an hour of its doors opening, more than 1,000 people had entered the exhibition. By noon, 3,000 physical and virtual tickets had been sold, while the museum had more than 4,000