Former government information office minister Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) is set to be nominated as the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) candidate for the Taoyuan County commissioner election in November after winning the party’s primary, the DPP said yesterday.
Cheng, 47, defeated former DPP legislators Cheng Pao-ching (鄭寶清) and Peng Shao-chin (彭紹瑾) in a public opinion poll conducted by the party headquarters on Wednesday by a significant margin, DPP Secretary-General Lin Hsi-yao (林錫耀) told a press conference.
Details of the survey, which pitted each aspirant against Taoyuan County Commissioner John Wu (吳志揚), who is to seek re-election, would be kept confidential as per the contestants’ wishes, Lin said.
However, Lin did reveal that Cheng trailed Wu by less than 10 percentage points and could be a serious contender in the upcoming race.
In 2009, the party hastily recruited Cheng to run for the commissioner’s seat with just 58 days to go until the election and though he put up a good fight, he lost, albeit by less than 50,000 votes, or 6.5 percent of the total ballots cast.
Cheng’s nomination for this year’s contest in Taoyuan, which is to be upgraded to a special municipality later this year, will be official after the party’s Central Executive Committee approves it, Lin said.
In related news, DPP Legislator Pasuya Yao (姚文智), one of the party’s four aspiring candidates for the Taipei mayoral primary, yesterday unveiled more of his campaign platform, proposing a new spatial plan that would relocate a number of government buildings in the city.
Yao, who has proposed closing Taipei International Airport (Songshan airport) and transforming it into a “grand central park,” yesterday suggested moving the Presidential Office to a site in Dazhi District (大直) originally designated for a Ministry of National Defense compound.
The area currently occupied by the Presidential Office could be transformed into a museum, he added.
Yao also proposed relocating the Legislative and the Executive Yuan compounds to the area currently occupied by the airport, saying the site is capable of housing at least 100,000 protesters, which would ease any potential impact to traffic caused by increasingly frequent mass demonstrations.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
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