Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) yesterday celebrated two years in office at the opening of the city’s mass rapid transit (MRT) system’s Nangang station, while Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) marked the second anniversary of her term in office with a 30 percent jump in her approval rating.
In Taipei, Hau, looking back at this year, said the word “change” best described the challenges faced by Taipei, both sides of the Taiwan Strait and the world.
Hau made the remarks while cutting the ribbon to officially open Nangang MRT station yesterday morning.
PHOTO: FANG PIN-CHAO, TAIPEI TIMES
The Nangang east extension line has two stations — Nangang and Nangang Exhibition Center.
Nangang Exhibition Center station is scheduled to be completed by the end of next year.
The line extends east from Kunyang station on the blue line to join the new Neihu line’s terminus.
In related news, Taipei MRT yesterday also launched carriages painted with pandas, continuing the craze caused by the arrival of two pandas from China earlier this week.
Meanwhile in Kaohsiung, Chen celebrated her second anniversary by releasing a survey conducted by the city’s Research, Development and Evaluation Commission which showed that her approval rating has risen to 65 percent.
In a speech delivered at a second anniversary celebration, Chen said she had accomplished what her predecessors had failed to accomplish in the past, including establishing a tropical botanical zone in the Tapingting (大坪頂), a suburban area in the Kaohsiung’s Xiaogang District (小港).
She said the city government had been able to respond faster than the central government to crises over the past two years, such as by spending NT$50 million (US$1.5 million) to create 500 jobs for residents coming from disadvantaged backgrounds amid the recent global financial crisis and having wholesale markets set up special zones selling only products made in Taiwan amid the tainted Chinese dairy products scare.
The city has also become greener over the past two years, she said, vowing to develop the cultural and digital industries, and to complete the construction of the underground railroad systems.
The Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts yesterday apologized for forbidding children from copying paintings by freehand drawing, saying it welcomes visitors to make sketches of paintings on drawing tablets or sketchpads. The museum issued the remark after a museumgoer nicknamed “Mickeyelk Gesner” on Thursday posted on Facebook that her son had been sketching a painting by Pablo Picasso on a tablet computer at the exhibition “Capturing the Moment” on Wednesday when a museum worker told him to stop drawing. “The staff told us, ‘Only taking photos is allowed. No copying. This is a rule,’” she quoted the worker as saying. Physician Lee Chia-yan
China’s travel booking platform ctrip.com has removed the Evergreen Laurel Hotel in Shanghai from its listings after the chain’s Paris venue banned the Chinese national flag during the 2024 Summer Olympics, sparking an Internet furor. The story — which had garnered 110 million views on Sina Weibo — had since been removed from the platform’s list of most popular posts. On Monday, a Chinese influencer known as Instructor Zhang (張教官) accused the Evergreen Laurel Hotel in Paris of refusing his request for the Chinese flag to be displayed at the venue in a video uploaded to TikTok. A person purported to be a
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