Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Liu Chao-hao (劉櫂豪) is expected to be directly recruited by the DPP as its candidate in the Taitung County commissioner election in the Central Executive Committee (CEC) meeting today.
Liu announced that he would accept the party’s direct nomination as candidate in a press conference held in Taitung City yesterday.
“I am in the race because of my inseparable feelings toward this place where I grew up and because competition would bring about more changes to the eastern county,” Liu told the press conference.
If nominated, the election in November will be Liu’s fourth participation in the commissioner race in his hometown, which has been a perennially weak constituency for the DPP.
The 47-year-old has lost three times in previous election attempts, including the 2005 race, when he ran as an independent, the by-election in 2006 and the 2009 race as a DPP candidate. Liu lost by 5,300 votes, or 5.1 percent, to incumbent Taitung Commissioner Justin Huang (黃健庭) in 2009.
The former judge at the Kaohsiung and Taitung district courts boosted his political profile with a speech during an interpellation session at the Legislative Yuan, when he questioned then-prosecutor-general Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘) over Huang’s alleged leaking of secret information related to an ongoing investigation to President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) during the so-called “September Strife” between the president and Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平).
The video clip of Liu’s speech went viral on the Internet.
According to DPP spokesperson Xavier Chang (張惇涵), Liu’s nomination is expected to be approved by the CEC meeting.
Responding to Liu’s potential challenge, Taitung Commissioner Justin Huang, who is seeking re-election, said he has confidence in what he has achieved in the past four years and he “would be competing with nobody but himself” in the election.
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
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