Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday reaffirmed his good relationship with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) after only one DPP Taipei city councilor attended a Lunar New Year greeting event in the morning.
As officials returned to work yesterday, Ko attended the routine event at the Taipei City Council.
“The council has helped the city government a lot over the past three years, and the councilors’ supervision is a reminder for the government to make improvements,” Ko said, adding that city councilors know what Taipei’s residents need more than the government does, so he has asked all departments to take the councilors’ criticism as suggestions for improvement.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
“We will this year continue to maintain this attitude, to consider the councilors’ suggestions and realize them,” Ko said. “They are the source of information for the city government’s improvement.”
However, as Taipei City Councilor Wang Wei-chung (王威中) was the only DPP councilor to attend the event this year, Ko was asked whether it reflected his relationship with the party.
“Maybe everyone is still enjoying the holiday,” Ko said. “I think some might still be on vacation in other nations ... and really good friends tend to not meet each other on public occasions.”
Asked again whether he is on good terms with the DPP, he said: “Very good.”
Asked about negative comments on a Lunar New Year’s greeting video featuring Ko and DPP Taipei City Councilor Lin Shih-tsung (林世宗) posted on Facebook last week, Ko said there is still a long way to go before the elections, and usually only people with opposing views will leave comments.
Asked whether he thinks the DPP and pan-green supporters would eventually appear and whether he discussed the issue with DPP Secretary-General Hung Yao-fu (洪耀福) over the holiday, the mayor said that integration takes time and that he has not spoken with Hung about it over the past five days, but might later.
Asked about the Taipei mayoral election, Hung said there are many possibilities in politics and that the DPP does not have to limit itself to the idea of cooperating with Ko.
“Of course, I cannot tell you,” Hung said, when asked about alternatives.
As Ko had made a remark about “choosing the lesser of two evils,” referring to cooperating with the DPP this year, Hung said the choice should be between “the better of two good options.”
Imagination is needed in politics so that innovative models can be created, such as an earlier “coalition of opposition parties,” Hung said.
DPP Legislator Pasuya Yao (姚文智) is a hardworking person and has always had progressive and constructive ideas that could benefit the city’s overall development, he added.
Additional reporting by Su Fang-ho
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