The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) yesterday rejected a local news report saying that its staff have been using the party’s caucus office in the Legislative Yuan as their working space, while confirming that it has made progress in finding new party headquarters.
The Chinese-language Mirror Media magazine reported that nearly 20 TPP party officials and staff have been “parasitizing” the party’s caucus office.
The magazine said it had received a tip-off that as the TPP’s workers are not employees of the Legislative Yuan, they do not have the work card required to enter the Legislative Yuan’s caucus office building, but the party provided a list of its staff to the building’s security and they were given permission to enter daily.
Photo courtesy of Taiwan People’s Party
The TPP staff who used the caucus office are from the party’s advertising department, and a video uploaded by the party on YouTube, in which an advertising department employee introduced the party’s secretary general, was filmed there, the magazine said.
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), the TPP chairman, has often stressed the importance of financial discipline, but allowing the party’s workers to use the caucus office — for which the electricity and phone bills are paid by the Legislative Yuan — seemed to be taking advantage of the government, the report said.
TPP spokesman Tsai Chun-wei (蔡峻維) said that all the people who are working at the office support the TPP legislative caucus by quickly replying to public opinions and assisting its operations.
The party rejects the claim that it is a parasite in the Legislative Yuan, as that is inconsistent with the facts, he said.
The TPP has been searching for a bigger space for its headquarters since last year, but many landlords have concerns over renting to political parties, Tsai said, adding that some progress has been made in finding a property, and the details would be announced if further progress is made.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching