Department of Health (DOH) Minister Yeh Ching-chuan (葉金川) yesterday refused to say if he would resign to stand in the year-end Hualien County commissioner election, but said he would soon make a decision and inform Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄).
Yeh said the media should wait until he reports to Liu because it was up to the premier what he would do next.
There has been widespread media speculation that Yeh would resign from the DOH to run for the commissioner’s seat as the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) candidate.
Asia University vice president Yang Chih-liang (楊志良) has been widely tipped to be Yeh’s successor because of his expertise in long-term care.
Yang is the deputy convener of a health department panel on a long-term care insurance program that is drafting a law to create the program by the end of next year.
The Executive Yuan would respect Yeh’s decision on whether to run in the election, Executive Yuan Secretary-General Hsueh Hsiang-chuan (薛香川) said yesterday.
Yang said Yeh had asked him if he was interested in his job.
Yang said he told Yeh that he would like him to stay in the job as long as possible because of the A(H1N1) flu situation.
It has long been Yeh’s dream to return to Hualien, Yang said, but some in the media have distorted this ambition to allege that Yeh was not interested in his current job.
Amid pressure from would-be candidates upset at the KMT’s plan to nominate Yeh, party headquarters did a U-turn on Saturday night and announced that it would hold a primary for the Hualien commissioner election.
Meanwhile in Taoyuan County, KMT Legislator John Wu (吳志揚), son of outgoing KMT chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄), won the KMT primary yesterday for the Taoyuan county commissioner election.
His rival, Taoyuan County Council Speaker Tseng Chong-yi (曾忠義), said that the primary had been unfair. He also complained that the party had suppressed him from the beginning.
Tseng said President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) had hinted in June that he would like see John Wu run in the Taoyuan election because his victory would make for a good story since Wu Poh-hsiung had served as Taoyuan commissioner, as had his father.
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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