Amid speculation on Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng's (王金平) intention to compete with Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) for the party's nomination in the 2008 presidential election, the two met yesterday, but both denied discussing the issue.
Approached by the media after the meeting, Wang urged the press not to indulge in groundless speculation about candidates for the presidential election.
"Even though there will be someone who will express the intention to run in the 2008 presidential election, that person will not be the one everyone had in mind," Wang said yesterday in front of his residence.
Speculation was rampant among local media outlets that remarks made by Wang on Wednesday night, in an interview with SET-TV indicated that he intended to seek the nomination himself.
During the interview, Wang said that there was no guarantee that Ma would be the only candidate from the KMT seeking the party's nomination.
Wang and Ma yesterday denied exchanging ideas on the issue, saying that the meeting was about pan-blue cooperation between the KMT and the People First Party (PFP) in the wake of the Taipei and Kaohsiung mayoral elections.
Wang said he could stay on in the Legislative Yuan in the next legislative session, and that the time was not yet right to think about whether he would pair with Ma in the presidential election.
Meanwhile, in response to questions about the party's handling of former KMT member and Keelung Mayor Hsu Tsai-li (
Hsu was sentenced to seven years in jail by the Keelung District Court on Sept. 19 for trying to use his position to sell a plot of land to the Keelung City Government's bus department.
In response to a decision by a group of KMT legislative aides to initiate a recall motion against Hsu, KMT Spokesman Huang Yu-cheng (黃玉振) said the party would not prevent members from supporting the motion.
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
WATCH FOR HITCHHIKERS: The CDC warned those returning home from Japan to be alert for any contagious diseases that might have come back with them People who have returned from Japan following the World Baseball Classic (WBC) games during the weekend are recommended to watch for symptoms of infectious gastroenteritis, flu and measles for two weeks, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said. Flu viruses remain the most common respiratory pathogen in Taiwan in the past four weeks and the influenza B virus accounted for 55.7 percent of the tested cases, exceeding the percentage of influenza A (H3N2) infections and becoming the local dominant strain, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said at a news conference on Tuesday. There were 82,187 hospital visits for
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President William Lai (賴清德) today called for greater mutual aid between Taiwan and Japan in a post commemorating the 15th anniversary of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, saying that “true friendship reveals itself in hardship.” The magnitude 9 earthquake, the largest ever recorded in Japan, and the ensuing tsunami left 18,500 people dead or unaccounted for, and caused a meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. It was the world's worst nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl accident. Japan and Taiwan share a close bond built on mutual aid and trust, Lai said on Facebook, adding that he hopes they would
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