The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) took its first legislative seat in one of the nation’s outlying islands by winning the legislative race in Penghu County on Saturday.
DPP legislative candidate Yang Yao (楊曜), a Penghu councilman since 2005, beat veteran Legislator Lin Ping-kun (林炳坤) by a margin of 53.4 percent to 46.6 percent, ending years of efforts by the DPP to break Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-led pan-blue dominance in the county.
DPP candidates had lost to Lin by 20 percentage points and 11 percentage points in the 2004 and 2008 legislative races respectively.
However, in 2009, DPP candidate Tsai Chien-hsing (蔡見興) lost the county commissioner race by only 595 votes, or 1.3 percent, to Penghu County Commissioner Wang Chien-fa (王乾發), which gave the party a boost.
Yang appealed to voters with the slogan of “change,” while also highlighting the current government’s decision to slash the administrative budget for Penghu Hospital by half to NT$50 million (US$1.66 million) over a decade to underscore the county’s inadequate health resources.
He also said that Lin had failed to deliver on many of his campaign promises, which led to a desire for change among voters.
In the presidential race, -Penghu voters sided with President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), but Ma’s margin of victory of 4.1 percent was smaller than the 6 percent he won nationally.
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
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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