A survey conducted on Tuesday by Dailyview.tw — a Web site analyzing the latest trends among Internet users — showed that the approval rating of Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) has plunged to 35 percent, with the site saying that the Taipei City Government’s slow progress on its probe into the “five cases” and its transportation policies are the main factors behind Ko’s decrease in popularity.
The survey, conducted at the behest of the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper), used big data analysis to process 200,000 messages posted by Internet users on social networking Web sites such as the Professional Technology Temple (PTT).
Dailyview chief editor Liu Yan-li (劉彥澧) said the top five sources of negative feedback on Ko were the encumbered investigation into the “five cases,” which Liu said had “petered out,” Taipei’s traffic congestion, Ko’s proposal that people work a makeup day after typhoon days, his scooter parking fee proposal and a scheduled bus fare hike.
Liu said that Ko’s popularity peaked at about 70 percent close to the 100th day after he assumed office and remained mostly stable at about 50 percent in the following six months; but that the mayor’s support rating took a major dip last month.
Ko used to refer to the five cases as the “five cases of malpractice.”
However, he has changed his rhetoric and now calls them the “five cases” after failing to produce evidence of his predecessors’ wrongdoing.
The “five cases” are the Taipei Dome (台北大巨蛋) complex build-operate-transfer project, the MeHas City (美河市) housing project, the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, the Syntrend Digital Park and the Taipei Twin Towers project (雙子星).
Ko in October last year said that the city’s Clean Government Committee had closed the Twin Towers case after failing to provide evidence that former Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) and his officials committed any illegalities in the bidding process for the project.
Ko yesterday refused to comment on his plummeting popularity.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS