Several minor parties with progressive agendas made gains in Saturday’s elections, including the Green Party Taiwan (GPT), which clinched its first electoral victories since it was founded in 1996.
Two out of the nine GPT candidates running for city and county councilor posts nationwide won, indicating growing support for the party’s platform of environmental awareness and grassroots social activism.
Chou Chiang-chieh (周江杰) was elected county councilor in Hsinchu County’s Chutung (竹東) and Wufeng (五峰) districts on the GPT’s ticket after a campaign bolstered by volunteers who canvassed hilly terrain on bicycles.
GPT candidate Wang Hao-yu (王浩宇) finished a surprising second in the contest for 10 council seats in Taoyuan’s Chungli District (中壢).
As the founder and moderator of a popular Facebook page titled: “I am from Chungli,” which features local news and entertainment, Wang channeled traffic generated by the page into support for his campaign, garnering 16,269 votes.
Meanwhile, the Tree Party — a GPT splinter organization founded earlier this year by former GPT secretary-general Pan Han-shen (潘翰聲) — triumphed in the mayoral election for Nantou County’s Chichi Township (集集), marking a successful start for the party.
Vowing to represent the interests of trees, cats and dogs, along with “all those who cannot speak for themselves,” the Tree Party basked in additional wins, including one in Chichi for Chen Chi-heng (陳紀衡) and Hsu Yu-lun’s (許育綸) campaign for a citizen representative seat in Hsinchu County’s Chubei Township (竹北).
Minor left-wing parties also made gains, with the socialist pro-unification Labor Party holding on to Gao Wei-kai’s (高偉凱) seat in the Hsinchu County Council, while its only other candidate, Chen Shin-yuan (陳新源), also succeeded, winning a citizen representative contest in Hsinchu County’s Hsinpu Township (新埔).
People Are The Boss — a party founded by labor rights activist Cheng Tsun-chi (鄭村棋) in 2011 — managed to grab one borough warden post, although it fielded 37 candidates nationwide, including in the mayoral races for Keelung and Chiayi City.
Advocates for more political autonomy for Aborigines celebrated wins for the Taiwan First Nations Party, a new group that saw three of its six candidates triumph.
Rungquan lhkatafatu, a Thao Aborigine, claimed a dramatic victory in the contest for the Plains Aborigines seat in the Nantou County Council, beating his rival by a single vote.
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