Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) yesterday welcomed the news that Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強) had appointed the principal of a prestigious Taipei high school as one of his deputies.
Hu’s announcement that he was appointing Taipei Jianguo High School principal Tsai Ping-kun (蔡炳坤) as deputy mayor took many by surprise.
Tsai has served as a division chief at the Ministry of Education and as the deputy commissioner of the Cultural Affairs Department in Taichung County. He was selected to be school principal in 2008.
PHOTO: LO PEI-DER, TAIPEI TIMES
“I think Mayor Hu made an excellent choice and I am glad that principal Tsai has the opportunity to serve more people in his future position,” Hau said.
Taipei’s Department of Education will organize a selection committee to choose Tsai’s successor.
In contrast with the municipal team put together by Hu and Eric Chu (朱立倫), mayor-elect of New Taipei City (新北市, the proposed name of the upgraded Taipei County), Hau’s new administration was described by the local media as lacking impressive faces or refreshing choices.
Democratic Progressive Party Taipei City Councilor Chuang Ruei-hsiung (莊瑞雄) said Hau’s new line-up was a “stale team” with only a few new members and little possibility of making impressive achievements during his second term.
However, Hau shrugged off the criticism, and said all of the officials had been picked for their administrative experience and expertise in their fields.
Hau announced his new administration lineup on Thursday, with seven new members joining the 37-member team.
Incoming Taipei deputy mayor Chen Wei-ren (陳威仁) is Ministry of Transportation and Communications administrative deputy minister, while the next commissioner of the city’s transportation department, Jason Lin (林志盈), is now the general manager of Taipei EasyCard Corp. Both served as department heads for President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration when he was Taipei mayor.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift