Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday morning visited several sports venues in Taoyuan that are to be used in this year’s Summer Universiade and praised their quality, giving them a score of “99 percent.”
Accompanied by Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦), Ko visited the National Taiwan Sport University (NTSU) Arena’s swimming pool and water polo facilities, the track and field venue at Ming Chuan University’s Taoyuan campus and the taekwondo venue at the Taoyuan Arena.
“We are very grateful for the Taoyuan City Government’s help with the venues. I did not have to worry at all,” Ko said. “However, I am embarrassed to give them a full score of 100 percent, so I will give them 99 percent.”
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
Taoyuan is to host 15 of the Universiade’s venues and the city government has worked closely with the Taipei City Government to get them ready, Cheng said, adding that they would all meet the required standards.
In preparation for the games, the Taipei City Government allocated NT$4.9 million (US$161,184) to the Taoyuan City Government to renovate the city’s sports venues, while the Taoyuan City Government allocated NT$8.6 million.
The NTSU Arena now hosts a high-tech prefabricated pool that cost more than NT$100 million, Cheng said.
The World Taekwondo Federation said the Taoyuan Arena’s taekwondo venue is the best Universiade taekwondo venue of the past 15 years, Cheng said.
“We will find another place [in the city] to relocate the prefabricated pool to and a technical team has already evaluated several venues,” Cheng said. “We hope the utilization rate will be high, but the swimming pool is 2m deep, so we plan to adjust the depth before letting the public use the pool.”
If the Summer Universiade is a success, not only Taipei, but the whole of Taiwan would win praise, he said.
Yesterday marked Ko’s fourth exchange visit with city and county heads.
Such exchanges deepen friendship between Taipei and other cities or counties, Ko said, adding that they provide a good opportunity to learn and improve governance.
Asked what he had learned from Cheng, Ko said that he admires Cheng’s handling of relations between the city council and the city government.
Ko described himself as a political neophyte, and said that he is like a vehicle that has a “learner driver” sticker on its bumper, clumsy at first, but now much more steady.
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
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
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