President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday led newly elected members of the Central Standing Committee (CSC) on a trip to Pingtung County to campaign for the party’s candidate for county commissioner.
Ma, in his capacity as Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman ,will preside over five other CSC meetings in central and southern Taiwan ahead of local government elections on Dec. 5 to raise support for KMT candidates.
“We will hold the CSC in other parts of Taiwan to hear the voices of locals and help develop local industries ... Of course we will spare no efforts to take back Pingtung County next month,” Ma said yesterday while campaigning for Chou Dian-lun (周典論), the party’s candidate there.
Ma said the race in Pingtung was tight, urging party members to put all their efforts into helping Chou’s campaign.
Yang Yuan-hsun (楊元勳), director of the party’s Pingtung branch, said the election result could be decided by as few as 10,000 votes.
Meanwhile, KMT spokesman Lee Chien-jung (李建榮) yesterday dismissed allegations that Ma had accused the Cabinet of poorly handling the signing of the financial memorandum of understanding (MOU) with China.
The Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) cited Ma as saying that the Cabinet’s signing of the MOU had flaws and demanding the Cabinet review the process.
Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) has criticized the Cabinet for showing disrespect to the legislature by rushing to sign the MOU with Beijing on Monday night and ignoring the legislature’s right to supervise the process.
Lee said Ma was not dissatisfied with the Cabinet’s handling of the MOU. The Cabinet communicated with the legislature before inking the MOU with China, he said.
Taipei and Beijing on Monday evening signed a MOU on financial regulatory cooperation, agreeing on issues such as cross-strait financial supervision, information sharing and risk management. Wang said that in only reporting the MOU on Monday morning, the Cabinet hadn’t given the legislature time to discuss the matter.
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