The Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) Taipei and Sinbei City mayoral candidates yesterday pledged to work together in cleaning the polluted Tamsui River (淡水河) as the two unveiled their first joint campaign commercial.
Signing a pledge at KMT headquarters, Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) and the KMT’s Sinbei City candidate, Eric Chu (朱立倫), promised to establish a “Tamsui River Management Department” and invest NT$50 billion (US$1.5 billion) in the next five years to clean up Tamsui.
“We hope to turn the Tamsui River into a place for residents to take a walk, ride their bike or just relax ... Let the Tamsui River be the pride of Taipei and Sinbei City,” Chu said.
Under the proposal, Hau said the river was expected to become a new recreational destination in Taipei by 2015.
The dredging and cleaning of Tamsui River was one of Hau’s major campaign promises when he ran for mayor in 2006.
Vowing to continue the cleanup and proceed with urban renewal projects around the river to turn it into the “Manhattan Riverside” of Taipei, Hau said Taipei would allocate 200 hectares of space along the river to build affordable housing units and an art zone, while Sinbei City would have 303 hectares of land for urban renewal projects.
The campaign commercial was the first of a series of joint campaign advertisements by the two camps, as the KMT sought to appeal to voters by highlighting the close cooperation between Hau and Chu in continuing municipal construction.
In other news, KMT Secretary-General King Pu-tsung (金溥聰) yesterday said that relations between the party and KMT Tainan County branch director Lee Chuang-chiao (李全教) remained good despite a lawsuit filed by Lee against the party last year.
Lee filed the lawsuit after the party accused him in September last year of bribery to win a seat in the party’s Central Standing Committee and suspended his party rights for three months. The suspension disqualified him from running for re-election on the committee.
The Taipei District Court on Tuesday ruled in favor of Lee, granting him the right to reclaim his status on the committee.
King lauded Lee’s efforts in integrating local factions in the Greater Tainan area for the upcoming election, but declined to answer when asked whether the party would appeal.
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:
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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