The People First Party (PFP) yesterday announced its first batch of candidates for the year-end local elections, nominating 20 people to run for city and county councilor seats as it celebrated its 18th anniversary.
PFP Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) made the announcements as he presided over a news conference at the party’s new headquarters on Taipei’s Songjiang Road.
Among the nominees are six candidates for the Keelung election, three for Taipei, two each for Taoyuan and Tainan, and one each for Hsinchu, Taichung and Kaohsiung, as well as one each for Yilan, Kinmen, Hsinchu and Miaoli counties.
“We are 18, we are an A-team,” Soong said, as he highlighted the seven incumbent city councilors on the list, including Taipei city councilors Vivian Huang (黃珊珊) and Lin Kuo-cheng (林國成); Keelung city councilors Hsu Li-li (徐莉莉), Chuang Ching-tien (莊錦田) and Yang Hsiu-yu (楊秀玉); Taichung City Councilor Hung Ching-fu (洪金福) and Yilan County Councilor Chen Chieh-lin (陳傑麟).
Soong said he hoped the candidates could become an unwavering force in service of Taiwan, its people and cross-strait peace.
Although the party has had its ups and downs over the past 18 years, the PFP has never forsaken its founding principle, which is not to serve the pan-green or pan-blue camps, but to be a team that fights for what it believes, Soong said.
Asked whether the PFP plans to field a candidate for the Taipei mayoral seat in the Nov. 24 nine-in-one local elections, Soong said it has yet to discuss the matter, but would announce its decision at an opportune time.
However, if another party and its candidate would support the idea of putting the “people first,” his party would be willing to endorse that candidate, Soong said.
The PFP, which split from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), does not govern any city or county. It occupies three out of the 113 seats in the Legislative Yuan.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS