Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Secretary-General King Pu-tsung (金溥聰) yesterday stumped in Tainan and Kaohsiung for party candidates in the Nov. 27 special municipality elections, saying he was confident the party would do well in the pan-green strongholds.
Amid cheers from supporters, King accompanied Tainan mayoral candidate Kuo Tien-tsai (郭添財) on the streets in the morning and later met up with Kaohsiung mayoral candidate Huang Chao-shun (黃昭順) on a visit to a veterans’ community in Zuoying District (左營), where he met hundreds of supporters.
Discussing the elections in the south, King said the party had expanded its support base in Tainan and that Kuo would campaign in all 31 townships in Tainan city and county, which will be combined as Greater Tainan on Dec. 25.
King said the party remained fully behind Huang and once again denied speculation by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and local factions within the KMT that the party was siding with Kaohsiung County Commissioner Yang Chiu-hsing (楊秋興), who is running as an independent, in the battle to unseat Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊).
“As a political party with vision, the KMT does not aim for short-term victories. We will fight bravely for our candidates until the last moment and strive for victory,” he said.
Despite repeated denials, speculation about an under-the-table deal between the KMT and Yang continues to cast a shadow on Huang, who remains in third place in the opinion polls.
In a statement earlier this week, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who doubles as KMT chairman, called on the more than 140,000 party members in Kaohsiung to rally behind Huang.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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