Political ripples from the March 20 presidential election continued to spread yesterday, with lawmakers from the two main opposition parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the People First Party (PFP), refusing to attend a legislative session aimed at discussing their demand for a revision of the Presidential and Vice Presidential Election and Recall Law.
Lawmakers from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) urged Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) to persuade the KMT and PFP lawmakers to raise themselves above the dispute over the presidential election and attend to their jobs in the legislature.
Lee Chun-yi (
"Their absence from the legislature will neither help resolve the presidential election dispute nor serve the national interest," Lee said.
The KMT and PFP lawmakers boycotted the legislative session in an attempt to press the DPP into agreeing to their demand for a recount of the votes in the March 20 election, in which President Chen Shui-bian (
Legislator Ker Chien-ming (
He also urged Lien and his running-mate, PFP Chairman James Soong (
Noting that the KMT-PFP alliance has demanded that the election be annulled by the judiciary, Ker urged Lien and Soong to let justice run its course.
However, their KMT colleague dismissed the DPP lawmakers, claiming that they were trying to gloss over the dispute that it was an unfair election.
Legislator Liao Feng-teh (廖風德), secretary of the KMT caucus, said no talks with the DPP on cooperation in legislative reforms are possible before the government gives in to the pan-blue alliance demand for an immediate recount and a full investigation into the shooting of Chen and the activation of the national security mechanism.
He said his party was not pinning its hopes on the legislature to revise the law, which would allow for a recount.
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:
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