Vice Premier Eric Chu (朱立倫) and Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) yesterday inspected the construction project for the MRT’s Xinzhuang and Luzhou line, promising to strengthen cooperation as the two year-end election hopefuls used the occasion to campaign for November’s special municipality polls.
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is expected to nominate Chu as the candidate in the Sinbei City race, while Hau is likely to seek re-election in November.
“The cooperation between Vice Premier Chu and Taipei City has always been smooth,” Hau said after inspecting the line at Sanchung, Taipei County.
Chu said he and Hau share the goal of completing the line on schedule, adding that the most important mission would be focusing efforts on municipal construction projects.
The MRT Xinzhuang Line is a high-capacity extension of the Zhonghe Line with 16 stations. It will connect Taipei City to Sanchong and Xinzhuang in Taipei County, which will be upgraded in December and renamed as Sinbei City.
The line is scheduled to begin services in 2012.
Chu said that there are 10 MRT line projects in the greater Taipei area that will be completed by 2015, including the line to Taoyuan International Airport.
Chu added that Taipei City and Sinbei must join efforts to push for transportation construction across the two cities.
Meanwhile, in an interview with TTV yesterday, KMT Secretary-General King Pu-tsung (金溥聰) said Chu’s decision to run for election in Sinbei City has boosted the KMT’s momentum in the area.
King also lauded Hau for showing his determination to win the election against former DPP premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) of the Democratic Progressive Party in Taipei City, and said the KMT was confident of their election chances in Sinbei and Taipei cities.
The KMT conducted polls earlier this week in Taipei City, greater Tainan City and greater Kaohsiung City among hopefuls, and the poll results will serve as a key reference point for the party in finalizing the candidate list.
King said that the party will start a second round of negotiations now that the poll results have been released, adding that the nomination mechanism is fair.
“There is only a slim chance that we would nominate hopefuls who did not top the polls. However, there should be flexibility in politics, and we will continue the negotiations in case some hopefuls refuse to accept the poll results,” he said.
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
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
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