The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday denied assertions by former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) that the party’s collaboration with independent hopeful Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) in the Taipei mayoral election was a personal decision by DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), saying it was a “collective decision of the party.”
“The decision not to nominate our own candidate in the election was made by the Central Executive Committee and it was a response to people’s expectations. However, we respect [Lu’s] comment,” DPP spokesperson Huang Di-ying (黃帝穎) said.
Lu, one of the early DPP hopefuls for the nomination, said in an interview with online news Web site NOWnews on Monday that “Tsai’s decision was a disgrace for the party,” and that the chairperson and party officials who supported Ko’s campaign should resign if Ko loses the election.
Responding to Lu’s comments, DPP Legislator Gao Jyh-peng (高志鵬), who served as convener of a task force for the party’s Taipei mayoral primary, reiterated that the decision was not of Tsai’s own and urged Lu to embrace the generational shift.
“A large ship will have to leave the port some day,” Gao said, urging Lu to leave the future to the younger generation.
“It is easy to make cynical remarks, but [Lu] should think about who would be the beneficiary of her remarks,” DPP Legislator Tuan Yi-kang (段宜康) said.
Tuan said that former DPP chairman Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) and Tsai were only implementing the committee’s decision and he wondered why the two should be held responsible for Ko’s election results.
Lu, who refused to participate in the primary mechanism to finalize a candidate between Ko and DPP contenders, reiterated yesterday that she did not rule out entering the mayoral race.
“I will give my blessings to Ko if his policy and ideology are consistent with those of the DPP. However, I will make my own decision if somehow he still has a strange political ideology,” Lu said.
Ko has been avoiding presenting his platform and it would be difficult to assess his intended policies, the former vice president said.
Lu is scheduled to organize a press conference today, in which she and several DPP members are expected to question the legitimacy of DPP-conducted polls — a longstanding mechanism the party has used to determine nominees, including the poll between Ko and DPP hopeful Pasuya Yao (姚文智) last week.
Ko beat Yao in the poll to secure the pan-green camp candidacy.
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