Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) founder, chairman and presidential candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) is scheduled to visit Japan from Sunday to Thursday next week, and would meet high-ranking officials to discuss international and cross-strait affairs, the TPP said.
Ko would spend most of his time in Tokyo and would meet with administrative and legislative officials, TPP Secretary-General Chou Tai-chu (周台竹) said, adding that former Taipei deputy mayor Vivian Huang (黃珊珊) would accompany Ko on the trip.
Ko, 63, spent three weeks in the US last month and was formally nominated as his party’s presidential candidate on May 17.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
In an interview with Nikkei Asia last month, Ko said that Japan, despite probably being under more pressure than Taiwan in terms of being caught in the middle of China-US tensions, has been dealing with the issue in a more flexible way.
He referred to former president Lee Teng-hui’s (李登輝) advice to him, saying that Taiwan should look to Japan if it faces challenges relating to the two superpowers.
Ko officially launched his presidential campaign in Taipei on May 20.
He said he was determined to run because he believed that Taiwan should be united, not divided, that it should be a facilitator of dialogue, not a “chess piece” between the US and China, that it should be Ilha Formosa — a beautiful island — rather than “the most dangerous place on Earth” as described by The Economist.
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