Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) joined Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Sinbei City mayoral candidate Eric Chu (朱立倫) on the election trail for the first time yesterday, telling supporters that Chu’s election policies had the full backing of both the Executive Yuan and the Presidential Office.
Wu went to Taipei City (which will be renamed Sinbei City in December when it is upgraded to a special municipality) amid recent polls that were inconclusive on just how many percentage points the KMT candidate was leading by, or whether he was leading at all, according to the latest survey conducted by his opponent’s campaign.
Seeking to give his platform a boost, Wu called Chu “the best -manager for Taipei County’s future,” and a “locomotive for Taiwan’s future.”
Chu had the administrative ability and was deeply concerned about the area’s development, the premier added.
Some of Chu’s major election trail promises include starting construction of 10 new MRT lines over the next decade and quadrupling the current transit network in the nation’s most populous municipality from 25km to over 100km. He has also vowed to build more schools — calling himself an “education-based mayor” — grow the economy and increase the tourist dollars flowing into the area.
These promises have been endorsed by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who gave them his “100 hundred percent support,” Wu said, adding that the legislature would also work closely with the future Sinbei City Council to ensure that they were implemented.
Although the KMT has claimed that both Chu and Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) of the KMT are leading their Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) opponents by at least 6 percentage points, other polls have painted a more mixed picture of the tightly fought election battle. The DPP claims its Sinbei mayoral candidate, DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), is currently leading by about half a percentage point.
Tsai, who has received backing from former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), yesterday traveled to Tamsui (淡水), where she told about 1,000 supporters that she wanted to give Sinbei City a “new start.”
She rejected comments that Wu’s endorsement would give Chu a lead before the key elections next month.
“Those in government should not be [hastily] giving out political checks during an election,” she said.
“The country’s resources are for everybody to use together” and not to give a KMT candidate an advantage, she added.
“Many people have started to realize this and are determining that the DPP must win the special municipality elections next month,” Tsai said.
Only with a strong opposition party would Taiwan’s freedoms, human rights and prosperity continue to make progress, she 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:
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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