Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je’s (柯文哲) election campaign office yesterday announced members of its financial supervisory committee and its campaign expenditures so far as Ko urged other mayoral candidates to follow suit.
Ko asked for a two-hour leave from Taipei City Council to attend a news conference at the office, saying that his campaign expenditures for the 2014 election were publicized by then-campaign office director and political commentator Yao Li-ming (姚立明).
As Yao in March questioned his previous campaign spending, Ko said he decided to hold an open audition and establish a financial supervisory committee to monitor his spending this year.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
Office spokesman Lin Hsiao-chi (林筱淇) said four of the total seven committee members were recruited through interviews and three were appointed by Ko, adding that the committee aims to make the expenditures more transparent.
The office said that it has so far raised NT$41.7 million (US$1.35 million) from July 3 to Sept. 30, and spent a total of NT$15.14 million.
Ko said he also took out a NT$20 million mortgage on his house, adding that he does not plan to raise any more funding for the campaign, and hopes to offset the spending with the election subsidy of NT$30 per vote.
Wu Chia-Yuan (吳嘉沅), a committee member and Social Impact Institute of Taiwan chairperson, said the committee members would monitor the legitimacy of the campaign’s financial sources and make sure the funds are put to good use.
The NT$48,000 fine that the Taipei City Government imposed on the office for parking a campaign truck in Qixing Park (七星公園) in Beitou District (北投) would not be covered by public donations, Wu said
Ko said the political principles of “open government, and open and transparent public participation” that he often repeats are not only slogans, but are principles that he implements.
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