The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday filed another lawsuit against Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD) Minister Christina Liu (劉憶如) and played down an opinion poll showing its presidential candidate, DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), behind by 8 percentage points.
Tsai received 32.2 percent of support from respondents, 8 percentage points behind President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 40.2 percent, an opinion poll published yesterday by the Chinese--language Apple Daily showed.
The survey, conducted from Monday to Wednesday with 1,101 samples, also showed 5.5 percent of respondents said they would vote for People First Party Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) and 22.1 percent remained undecided.
In response to press queries, Tsai offered the same answer every time she was asked about poll results, saying her campaign would “take the survey as a reference.”
In Taipei, the DPP filed another lawsuit against Liu and KMT spokesperson Lai Su-ju (賴素如) over violations of the Presidential and Vice Presidential Election and Recall Act (總統副總統選舉罷免法), accusing them of spreading rumors or false statements for the purpose of getting a candidate elected or impeding a candidate’s election chances.
Liu yesterday posted two questions on the CEPD Web site about Tsai’s alleged improper involvement in the formation of Yu Chang Biologics Co (宇昌生技股份有限公司), now know as TaiMed Biologics Inc (中裕新藥股份有限公司), when she served as vice premier between 2006 and 2007.
The public-owned National Development Fund (NDF) was authorized by the Executive Yuan to invest in Yu Chang, which appointed three board members and one supervisor, DPP spokesperson Kang Yu-cheng (康裕成) said. As the NDF had only one board member and one supervisor, Liu was wrong to characterize it as the majority investor she said.
DPP spokesperson Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) said Liu could easily find the answer to her second question regarding the different names of various companies during the formation of Yu Chang by checking information with the Ministry of Economic Affairs.
Liu had repeatedly cited incorrect information or altered documents to smear Tsai and benefit President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) re-election campaign, he said.
In related news, Chen criticized Ma in a press release yesterday for citing an incorrect report.
Citing a Financial Times report in September, Ma said during a televised platform presentation on Friday night that the US government had expressed concerns about stability across the Taiwan Strait if Tsai was elected president.
Chen said the US Department of State had reaffirmed that comments by the unnamed official quoted in the newspaper did not represent the official position of the US government and the US would remain neutral in Taiwan Jan. 14 presidential and legislative elections
“It was a vicious campaign tactic,” Chen said.
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