New Power Party (NPP) Legislator Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) on Tuesday said that he would support his legislative office director, Lai Chia-lun (賴嘉倫), if he decides to run for legislator, following speculation that Lai could replace him as the party’s candidate in New Taipei City’s Sijhih District (汐止).
“Lai is the best in my office, perhaps better than most incumbent legislators in terms of his ability to draft bills, conduct interpellations and fight corruption,” Huang said on his Facebook fan group page.
If Lai decides to run, “I would of course support him,” Huang wrote.
Photo: Chien Jung-fong, Taipei Times
As for his personal plans, Huang said he has promised voters to be a legislator for four years and he takes his responsibility seriously.
Asked about the rumors that he would run for office, Lai yesterday said that he would formally respond at a news conference on Tuesday next week.
Records on the Control Yuan Web site show that Lai on Monday applied to set up an account at the Bank of Taiwan’s Sijhih branch to receive political donations as a legislative candidate. The application has already been approved.
NPP member Chen Yu-fan (陳雨凡), who is running for the Xinyi-Songshan legislative seat, said on Facebook on Tuesday night that Huang was causing confusion in the party by not announcing his plans sooner.
With the Jan. 11 presidential and legislative elections just 150 days away, the NPP has yet to decide whether to support President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) re-election bid and collaborate with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to pool votes in the legislative elections, Chen said.
“This is because members respect Huang too much, to the point that they keep waiting for him to decide whether to run for re-election in Sijhih,” she said. “Huang should accept responsibility for the way things have turned out.”
By delaying decisions on key issues, party members have undermined the NPP’s democratic procedures, she said.
If the party’s decisionmaking committee would rather run the risk of helping the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) win seats in the legislature than collaborate with the DPP, it should make its stance known, she said.
In that case, “I would make a decision about whether to leave the party,” she added.
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