New Taipei City Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) launched his bid for another four-year term yesterday by completing his registration with the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) local chapter, vowing to stay in the race to the end amid speculation that he could abandon the mayor’s office to focus on the 2016 presidential election.
After he completed the registration process, Chu told reporters that his re-election campaign headquarters would be established at an appropriate date, adding that his campaign team would be comprised of people from every sector of society.
The mayor then lamented what he termed an opposition smear campaign against him, saying: “If the so-called Yu Chang (宇昌) case is an example of the worst type of political competition, the opposition should think about the smear campaining they are waging against me, which could be said to be far worse than the Yu Chang case.”
Photo: CNA
Chu was referring to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) comments on Sunday describing the Yu Chang case — which the KMT used to attack her integrity during the 2011 presidential campaign — as “the worst example of how a ruling party sacrificed a strategically important sector for political gains.”
The KMT accused Tsai of corruption and manipulating investments by the National Development Fund in TaiMed when she was vice premier in 2007, leading to a series of investigations by the Control Yuan and the judiciary, but Tsai was cleared of any wrongdoing.
In an interview published yesterday by the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper), Chu’s father-in-law, former Taiwan Provincial Assembly Kao Yu-jen (高育仁), denied any wrongdoing on his, his son’s and the Kao family’s behalf regarding several investment cases that they have been linked to and which the opposition say constitute a conflict of interest.
Meanwhile, the DPP’s New Taipei City mayoral candidate, former premier Yu Shyi-kun (游錫堃), described the trio of Chu, KMT Taoyuan County Commissioner John Wu (吳志揚) and KMT Taipei mayoral candidate Sean Lien (連勝文) as a group of “princelings” from powerful political families, urging voters to use their ballots to quash hereditary politics.
“The situation is clear: The year-end elections in northern Taiwan will be a battle between the princelings and a group of ordinary citizens, like myself, the DPP Taoyuan County commissioner candidate Cheng Wen-tsang (鄭文燦) and independent Taipei contender Ko Wen-je (柯文哲),” Yu said.
Former Taipei EasyCard Corp chairman Lien’s father is former vice president Lien Chan (連戰), while Wu’s father is former KMT chairman Wu Po-hsiung (吳伯雄).
John Wu, Wu Po-hsiung and John Wu’s grandfather, Wu Hung-lin (吳鴻麟), all served as Taoyuan County commissioners.
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