Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday dismissed a comment by former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) that Ko would run for president in 2020 as “strange logic.”
Chen was commenting on Ko’s remarks in an interview published by Bloomberg on Friday, when he said that “Taiwan is just a product on a shelf” for US President Donald Trump in the great power game between the US and China, and Trump might sell out Taiwan.
Chen on Monday posted on Facebook that although Ko has said he does not want to run for president, his comments imply that he would.
China has betrayed Taiwan before and the US is now protecting Taiwan, so Taiwan is purchasing weapons from the US as insurance, but Taiwanese have to stand together to become stronger and self-reliant, Chen wrote.
“The Taipei mayor does not have the power to sell Taiwan, but the president might,” Chen added.
Asked if he would run for president if he loses his re-election bid, Ko just laughed and walked away.
In related news, author Ku Ling (苦苓) on Sunday posted on Facebook his predictions of who would win the mayoral elections in the six special municipalities, including Ko and former premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌), the Democratic Progressive Party’s candidate in New Taipei City.
The critical factor for a Su victory would be whether Ko would support him on the campaign trail, Ku Ling added.
Asked about Ku Ling’s remarks, Ko said he had been watching political talk shows speculating on whether he would support other candidates, but he has not received an invitation from Su.
However, he wondered why no one has offered to show their support at his campaign events, he told reporters.
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