The presidential election campaign officially kicked off yesterday, 27 days before the March 20 presidential poll.
The Central Election Commission (CEC) had issued a gazette Friday introducing the profiles of the two contending presidential tickets -- opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan(連戰), teaming up with People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) to challenge the re-election bid of President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮).
According to the CEC gazette, candidates may hold campaign rallies from 7am to 10pm. Anyone going over the limit will face fines of NT$50,000 to NT$500,000. Candidates in major local elections are often willing to pay the fines in order to stage raucous late-night rallies with blaring airhorns and laser light shows.
The commission is scheduled to finalize the compilation of the voter rolls at the end of this month and will publish the rolls between March 2 and March 4. Eligible voters can ask for corrections of the rolls within a specified period of time. The commission will formally announce on March 16 the exact number of voters eligible to cast ballots in the presidential poll.
According to the commission's schedule, a bulletin detailing the locations of all polling stations will be issued before March 4. The commission is also scheduled to complete ballot printing and distribution of election bulletins and voting notices by March 17.
With just four weeks to go before the election, most opinion polls show that about one-fifth of eligible voters remain undecided.
Government data shows that some 16.4 million people are eligible to vote, an increase of about 1 million from the 2000 election.
In addition to electing the president and vice president, voters will also cast two additional ballots on two questions put forth in the nation's first-ever referendum, to be held alongside the presidential poll.
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