Every public opinion poll is “for reference only” and there is no need to panic, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said yesterday in response to a media poll which shows support for Tsai trailing President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who is seeking re-election, by 2.95 percent.
Head to head, Ma led Tsai with 36.87 percent to 33.92 percent, with 29.21 percent of respondents undecided or opting not to answer, according to the poll conducted by the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times sister newspaper) on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
If People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) enters the January presidential election and makes it a three-way race, Ma still leads Tsai with 31.46 percent of the vote compared with 28.23 percent for Tsai. Soong would receive 14.68 percent of the vote with 25.63 percent undecided or opting not to answer, the survey showed.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
Ma increased his lead over Tsai from 2.1 percent in the previous Liberty Times poll.
The lastest poll showed that Ma enjoys a comfortable lead of more than 10 percent in the 20 to 29-year-old age bracket while Tsai leads Ma by more than 10 percent in the 30 to 39-year-old and 60 to 69-year-old age brackets.
The latest Liberty Times poll collected 1,424 samples and has a 2.6 percent margin of error.
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