President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday visited Nantou County with his re-election bid running mate, Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義), seeking to expand his support base in central and southern Taiwan as a major strategy for the presidential election campaign.
Ma and Wu attended the launching ceremony of a railway line at Jiji (集集) Station yesterday, defending the government’s efforts to promote tourism in the area.
Addressing the ceremony, Ma, who doubles as the Chinese -Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman, said the Taipei City Government helped raised money to rebuild Jiji Township in the wake of the 921 Earthquake 10 years ago, and it was happy that the town has turned into a popular tourist destination.
Wu, a former Nantou County commissioner, said 5 million tourists visited the county last year.
“It’s all because of the president’s policies that the county enjoyed a booming tourism industry,” he said.
The presidential and vice presidential candidates also visited businesses in Nantou and met with representatives of industrial districts of the county, where Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson and presidential nominee Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) also made an appearance yesterday.
As southern cities and counties continue to be considered pan-green strongholds, the KMT is focusing on the south.
With January’s presidential election approaching, Ma and Wu have been making joint efforts to tour around the nation campaigning for their presidential and vice presidential ticket while attacking Tsai and the DPP over the previous government’s corruption and bribery scandals.
King Pu-tsung (金溥聰), executive director of Ma’s campaign office, said that support in the south would be crucial for the KMT in the presidential election because political support bases in northern and central Taiwan were more consolidated.
The campaign office will arrange frequent trips to southern Taiwan for Ma and Wu, he said.
King added that Ma’s national re-election headquarters will open in November.
Former SET News anchor Lee You-lung (李猶龍) will be invited to head the press department of the planned office, King said, adding that Chan Chun-po (詹春柏), a vice chairman of the KMT, has been assigned to assist in the establishment of the national campaign headquarters.
Ma’s re-election campaign was officially launched on June 13. King said they were finalizing the campaign team for many different functions, including new media, creation and innovation, press and strategic planning.
Next month, the regional election base in central Taiwan will be inaugurated. Another regional office in southern Taiwan, as well as local offices in 23 counties and cities across Taiwan, will all be set up between October and November, he said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY CNA
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
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
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