Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday said that integration is needed for cooperation, when it was revealed that neither Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) nor Hon Hai Precision Industry founder Terry Gou (郭台銘) would be accompanying him to a religious event today.
On Wednesday, Ko said he would be meeting Gou and Wang today at an event in Taoyuan, giving the trio the opportunity to appear in public together and to meet privately afterward to discuss next year’s presidential and legislative elections.
Last month, Gou lost to Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) in the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) presidential primary, while in June, Wang, who served as legislative speaker for nearly 17 years, announced that he would not participate in the primary, but would “run in the election come what may.”
Photo: Tu Chien-jung, Taipei Times
However, on Friday, Wang said he would not be at today’s event and, yesterday, Gou’s office announced that Guo would not be there.
Asked yesterday about a rumor that Wang and Guo are not happy with his public remarks about possibly collaborating, Ko said that they needed to integrate some of their ideas as they had never cooperated before.
Wang and Guo had each asked him if he would be their running mate, Ko said in a radio interview on Friday.
“I refused both offers,” he said.
“We must consider what society really needs right now,” Ko said, adding that “if we are doing something not needed, even trying very hard will not make it happen.”
In Tainan yesterday, Wang said that when he met with Ko, he did not mention running as president or vice president, but that they only discussed ideas about how to govern the nation.
Additional reporting by CNA
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods