Six more referendums are set to be held on Nov. 24 alongside the nine-in-one local elections after passing the Central Election Commission’s final review, the commission said yesterday, adding that all forged signatures found in the petitions would be reported to prosecutors so that criminal charges could be brought.
One referendum proposes scrapping the planned coal-fired Shenao Power Plant (深澳電廠) and another keeping the import ban on food products from five Japanese prefectures imposed following the 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant disaster — both proposed by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) — while two referendums address opposing same-sex marriage, one referendum banning education on homosexuality at elementary and junior-high schools, and one renaming the national sports team to “Taiwan” instead of “Chinese Taipei” for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Signatures using the names of people passed away before the signing date have been found in the submissions of all six proposals and since they were clearly forged, the commission said it has decided to report all of them to prosecutors based on Article 241 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (刑事訴訟法).
The commission has said that the same standards and process for dealing with forgery would be applied to all referendum proposals.
Of the six referendums, the proposal to keep the ban on Japanese food products was found to contain the highest percentage of signatures using dead people’s names, with 11,534 signatures using dead people’s names and 72,810 apparently forged signatures.
A total of 10 referendums are expected to be held on Nov. 24.
The other three are a proposal to pass amendments to the Civil Code to legalize same-sex marriage; a proposal for mandatory education on relationships, sex and homosexuality at elementary and junior-high schools; and a proposal to abolish the government’s plan for phasing out nuclear power.
Additional reporting by Ann Maxon
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS