The race to appoint the new legislative speaker is heating up as the legislative election campaign picks up speed, with the pan-green candidate, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Secretary-General Chang Chun-hsiung (張俊雄), lashing out at incumbent Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) over "black gold" politics.
Two days ago a local Chinese-language daily printed interviews with Chang and Wang about their outlook for their election campaigns. While Wang attacked Chang's performance as premier during the disputes over the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, Chang hinted that Wang, as legislative speaker, had offered protection for "black gold lawmakers."
Chang said that, during the past two legislative terms, the Legislative Yuan has resisted the courts' requests to arrest lawmakers who had broken laws.
He added that the legislature even helped certain lawmakers who have been banned from travelling abroad to leave the country during the legislative recess and to avoid arrest.
But according to the Legislative Yuan, only one request for the arrest of a lawmaker was received during Wang's term as speaker -- that of independent lawmaker Su Yin-kuei (蘇盈貴).
The court's request was delivered to the legislature's Procedure Committee, and the committee resolved to simply ignore the request, the legislature said yesterday.
Further, according to the legislature, when a lawmaker who has been banned from international travel wants to make a request to the court or the Ministry of Finance for permission to temporarily leave the country, the lawmaker has to contact the Legislative Yuan's secretariat for help with necessary administrative procedures. The legislative speaker's office is not informed of the request. The request goes no further than a copy being sent to the office of the secretary-general of the Legislative Yuan.
But the pan-green camp said yesterday that it was questionable whether the legislative speaker would really know nothing about lawmakers requesting temporary suspension of a travel ban.
"If the legislative speaker did not approve of the request, will the secretariat be bold enough to approve the request on its own?" DPP caucus whip Tsai Huang-liang (蔡煌瑯) asked, citing fugitive former legislator Wu Tze-yuan (伍澤元) as an example.
Wu had asked the legislature to help him with a request for a temporary suspension of his travel ban at the end of 2001, but he never returned. Wu is now believed to be hiding in China.
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
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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