People First Party presidential candidate James Soong (宋楚瑜) said yesterday he intends to become the first elected Taiwanese president to visit China if he wins in next month’s poll.
Soong, a former heavyweight in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), said he hoped to go to China as president-elect to promote goodwill and peace between the two sides.
He also pledged to host conferences to discuss China issues if elected to ensure the public would have a say in his policymaking process. He did not specify who would attend these conferences.
In related news, various civic groups claimed that the three presidential candidates have not clarified their perspectives on cross-strait policies, which are crucial to Taiwan’s future development, and demanded clarification from all three.
The I Want a Good President Alliance, which consists of several civic groups, said at a press conference at the Legislative Yuan yesterday that President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) cross-strait policy showed “cowardice.”
The group described Democratic Progressive Party presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) policy as “hazy” and Soong’s policy as “concealed.”
Lai Chung-chiang (賴中強), head of the Cross-Strait Alliance Watch, said that during last Saturday’s presidential candidates’ televised debate, Ma criticized Tsai’s “Taiwan consensus” as relying too much on democratic procedures.
However, Ma should be aware that “democratic procedures should not be omitted” when dealing with cross-strait issues, Lai said.
According to Lai, while Ma mentioned during the debate that all cross-strait agreements are supervised by the Legislative Yuan, in reality, legislators rarely get a response when they ask about the details of the agreement, which he said makes Ma’s cross-strait negotiations only “10 percent democratic.”
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:
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
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