Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday said the city would reconsider proposed alterations to firefighter compensation standards, as controversy continued over the appropriate use of city seals bearing the mayor’s name.
Ko termed Fire Department Commissioner Wu Jun-hung’s (吳俊鴻) use of a mayoral seal to sign an official document altering compensation standards for injured or killed firefighters “irresponsible.”
“If something is decided by the Fire Department Commissioner himself without the document even being sent to City Hall, why would you use the mayor’s seal?” Ko said.
He said that, while he had not called for the commissioner to retract the document, the policy would be “reconsidered,” and rules governing the use of mayoral seals would be revised by the city’s secretariat.
The use of mayoral seals has come under scrutiny following reports that showed the “signature stamp” of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), then-Taipei mayor, on the 2006 contract of the controversial MeHAS City (美河市) development project.
Ma has said he was unclear about project details due to the division of responsibilities across different levels of the city government, leading to criticism from Ko that Ma was negligent.
Yesterday, Ko declined to elaborate on his previous comments in response to new rebuttals from Presidential Office spokesman Charles Chen (陳以信).
“Everything that should be said has already been said,” Ko said, adding that he found it strange that Ma would be so interested in responding to him, speculating that the reason was that Ma was overly “anxious.”
On Sunday, Chen said that while Ma understood the general direction of the city’s policy of promoting MRT joint development projects such as MeHAS City, being acquainted with details would have been administratively inefficient.
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