Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday morning visited several sports venues in Taoyuan that are to be used in this year’s Summer Universiade and praised their quality, giving them a score of “99 percent.”
Accompanied by Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦), Ko visited the National Taiwan Sport University (NTSU) Arena’s swimming pool and water polo facilities, the track and field venue at Ming Chuan University’s Taoyuan campus and the taekwondo venue at the Taoyuan Arena.
“We are very grateful for the Taoyuan City Government’s help with the venues. I did not have to worry at all,” Ko said. “However, I am embarrassed to give them a full score of 100 percent, so I will give them 99 percent.”
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
Taoyuan is to host 15 of the Universiade’s venues and the city government has worked closely with the Taipei City Government to get them ready, Cheng said, adding that they would all meet the required standards.
In preparation for the games, the Taipei City Government allocated NT$4.9 million (US$161,184) to the Taoyuan City Government to renovate the city’s sports venues, while the Taoyuan City Government allocated NT$8.6 million.
The NTSU Arena now hosts a high-tech prefabricated pool that cost more than NT$100 million, Cheng said.
The World Taekwondo Federation said the Taoyuan Arena’s taekwondo venue is the best Universiade taekwondo venue of the past 15 years, Cheng said.
“We will find another place [in the city] to relocate the prefabricated pool to and a technical team has already evaluated several venues,” Cheng said. “We hope the utilization rate will be high, but the swimming pool is 2m deep, so we plan to adjust the depth before letting the public use the pool.”
If the Summer Universiade is a success, not only Taipei, but the whole of Taiwan would win praise, he said.
Yesterday marked Ko’s fourth exchange visit with city and county heads.
Such exchanges deepen friendship between Taipei and other cities or counties, Ko said, adding that they provide a good opportunity to learn and improve governance.
Asked what he had learned from Cheng, Ko said that he admires Cheng’s handling of relations between the city council and the city government.
Ko described himself as a political neophyte, and said that he is like a vehicle that has a “learner driver” sticker on its bumper, clumsy at first, but now much more steady.
China might accelerate its strategic actions toward Taiwan, the South China Sea and across the first island chain, after the US officially entered a military conflict with Iran, as Beijing would perceive Washington as incapable of fighting a two-front war, a military expert said yesterday. The US’ ongoing conflict with Iran is not merely an act of retaliation or a “delaying tactic,” but a strategic military campaign aimed at dismantling Tehran’s nuclear capabilities and reshaping the regional order in the Middle East, said National Defense University distinguished adjunct lecturer Holmes Liao (廖宏祥), former McDonnell Douglas Aerospace representative in Taiwan. If
Prosecutors in New Taipei City yesterday indicted 31 individuals affiliated with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) for allegedly forging thousands of signatures in recall campaigns targeting three Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers. The indictments stem from investigations launched earlier this year after DPP lawmakers Su Chiao-hui (蘇巧慧) and Lee Kuen-cheng (李坤城) filed criminal complaints accusing campaign organizers of submitting false signatures in recall petitions against them. According to the New Taipei District Prosecutors Office, a total of 2,566 forged recall proposal forms in the initial proposer petition were found during the probe. Among those
ECHOVIRUS 11: The rate of enterovirus infections in northern Taiwan increased last week, with a four-year-old girl developing acute flaccid paralysis, the CDC said Two imported cases of chikungunya fever were reported last week, raising the total this year to 13 cases — the most for the same period in 18 years, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday. The two cases were a Taiwanese and a foreign national who both arrived from Indonesia, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The 13 cases reported this year are the most for the same period since chikungunya was added to the list of notifiable communicable diseases in October 2007, she said, adding that all the cases this year were imported, including 11 from
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) today condemned the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after the Czech officials confirmed that Chinese agents had surveilled Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) during her visit to Prague in March last year. Czech Military Intelligence director Petr Bartovsky yesterday said that Chinese operatives had attempted to create the conditions to carry out a demonstrative incident involving Hsiao, going as far as to plan a collision with her car. Hsiao was vice president-elect at the time. The MAC said that it has requested an explanation and demanded a public apology from Beijing. The CCP has repeatedly ignored the desires