With the five special municipality elections less than one month away, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday said he would step up his campaign for Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌), who is running neck-and-neck with Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌), his opponent from the Democratic Progressive Party.
Ma spent the afternoon shooting his weekly video address at the Taipei Story House to promote the achievements of Hau, who succeeded him as Taipei mayor, describing him as someone who was “as good a mayor as he [Ma] was.”
The Taipei Story House is located next to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, one of the exhibition venues for the Taipei International Flora Expo.
While the high-profile flora expo has been a keystone in Hau’s re-election bid, his campaign to return to office has been threatened by controversies surrounding flowers purchased for the expo as well as overpriced materials for the upgrading of the Xinsheng Overpass, with a number of city government officials under investigation for corruption.
To give Hau a boost, Ma said he would visit the flora expo sites on Friday evening.
Today, Ma, who is also the Chinese Nationalist party (KMT) chairman, will preside over the party’s weekly Central Standing Committee meeting at Shezi Island (社子島) in Taipei City.
Shezi Island is a low-lying area that has constantly been hit by flooding during typhoons. It is also the site of many illegal houses.
Hau pledged in January this year to turn the 240-hectare area into “Taipei’s Manhattan” within 11 years after a long-stalled development project passed a review by the Council for Economic Planning and Development.
Urban development has been another cornerstone of Hau’s election bid. KMT Spokesman Su Jun-pin (蘇俊賓) yesterday said the party decided to hold the Central Standing Committee meeting in Shezidao to show the party’s concern for the future development of the area.
Committee members will also wear polo shirts bearing the flora expo logo to show their support for Hau and the expo, he said.
Hau, who has been invited to speak at the meeting, will outline his achievements over the four years and his blueprint for the future.
Also today, the MRT Lujhou Line connecting Taipei City and Taipei County’s Lujhou (蘆洲) and Sanchong (三重) cities will begin a trial service, with Ma scheduled to attend the opening ceremony.
Service on the line will be free until Dec. 2, a move that has been criticized by some as a gambit to garner support for Hau in the Nov. 27 election.
Trial services for other MRT lines either provided free rides to residents in the area or offered free services for only several hours a day.
South Korean K-pop girl group Blackpink are to make Kaohsiung the first stop on their Asia tour when they perform at Kaohsiung National Stadium on Oct. 18 and 19, the event organizer said yesterday. The upcoming performances will also make Blackpink the first girl group ever to perform twice at the stadium. It will be the group’s third visit to Taiwan to stage a concert. The last time Blackpink held a concert in the city was in March 2023. Their first concert in Taiwan was on March 3, 2019, at NTSU Arena (Linkou Arena). The group’s 2022-2023 “Born Pink” tour set a
CPBL players, cheerleaders and officials pose at a news conference in Taipei yesterday announcing the upcoming All-Star Game. This year’s CPBL All-Star Weekend is to be held at the Taipei Dome on July 19 and 20.
The Taiwan High Court yesterday upheld a lower court’s decision that ruled in favor of former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) regarding the legitimacy of her doctoral degree. The issue surrounding Tsai’s academic credentials was raised by former political talk show host Dennis Peng (彭文正) in a Facebook post in June 2019, when Tsai was seeking re-election. Peng has repeatedly accused Tsai of never completing her doctoral dissertation to get a doctoral degree in law from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1984. He subsequently filed a declaratory action charging that
The Hualien Branch of the High Court today sentenced the main suspect in the 2021 fatal derailment of the Taroko Express to 12 years and six months in jail in the second trial of the suspect for his role in Taiwan’s deadliest train crash. Lee Yi-hsiang (李義祥), the driver of a crane truck that fell onto the tracks and which the the Taiwan Railways Administration's (TRA) train crashed into in an accident that killed 49 people and injured 200, was sentenced to seven years and 10 months in the first trial by the Hualien District Court in 2022. Hoa Van Hao, a
RSS