Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) retains a lead over rumored candidates for next year’s Taipei mayoral election, a survey by the Taiwan Competitiveness Forum said, while New Taipei City Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) has the highest approval rating among prospective pan-blue candidates.
The poll shows that Ko, an independent, has the highest overall approval rating at 38 percent, leading his rumored Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) challengers, Tainan Mayor William Lai (賴清德) and DPP Legislator Pasuya Yao (姚文智), whose ratings stand at 25.5 percent and 8.8 percent respectively.
Chu had the highest approval rating (30.3 percent) among Ko’s prospective pan-blue rivals, followed by former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Ting Shou-chung (丁守中) with 27.1 percent.
Forum director-general Pan Chien-kuo (龐建國) said the KMT would likely win pity votes if Ting were nominated.
Ting in 2010 and 2014 had the highest approval ratings during party primaries for the Taipei mayoral elections, but he gave KMT Central Standing Committee member Sean Lien (連勝文) and then-Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) the chance to run.
Chu, if elected, might suspend his mayoral duties and run for president, or be KMT chairman-elect Wu Den-yih’s (吳敦義) running mate in the 2020 presidential election, he said.
Chu in 2015 took leave from his mayoralty to campaign for president, sparking criticism that he had broken his promise to serve out his term.
Meanwhile, Hualien County Commissioner Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁), a rumored candidate for the Taipei race, yesterday promoted Hualien watermelons at Taipei’s Hope Farmers’ Market.
Fu, an independent in the pan-blue camp, has been gifting supersized watermelons reportedly weighing up to 18kg each to Taipei city councilors and reporters.
The move has prompted speculation over his potential Taipei bid.
In response to reporters’ questions on whether he would run for Taipei mayor, Fu said that he would not “rule out any opportunities to plow the fields of happiness.”
He said he also sent Ko some watermelons, too, to wish him luck for the Universiade in August.
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