Election campaign spending is too high and is where political corruption starts, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said yesterday.
Ko made the remarks while attending a municipal parent-child aerobics fair for preschool children in the city, where reporters asked him whether he is considering mortgaging his apartment to secure funds for his re-election campaign.
“It is hard to run the government [fairly] if I take other people’s money, so I am thinking about how to be an example of how to reduce election campaign spending,” Ko said.
Ko has come under fire after former campaign team members Yao Li-ming (姚立明) and Hsiao Ya-tan (蕭亞譚) were cited by media as saying that his expenses in the run-up to the 2014 Taipei mayoral election were not honestly declared.
Taipei City Government spokesman Liu Yi-ting (劉奕霆) said that Yao held three news conferences during the campaign to explain the team’s income and expenditures, and that the team truthfully declared its spending.
Reporters also asked Ko to comment on cryptocurrency exchange platform OTCBTC founder Cheng Yi-ting’s (鄭伊廷) announcement on Friday evening that she would run for Taipei mayor.
All eight hopefuls are older than 50, the 35-year-old programmer said in her announcement on Facebook, asking whether any of them could bring hope to residents.
“Mental age is more important than the age on your ID,” Ko said, adding that Taipei needs to develop e-commerce.
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