Cabinet Spokesman Cho Jung-tai (
"If we do so, that would be disrespectful to previous premiers," Cho said.
Cho's remarks were referring to a letter to the editor written by Vice President Annette Lu (
In the letter, Lu criticized the policy requiring fingerprints to be collected when members of the public apply for the new photo IDs.
"Forcing everybody to give their fingerprints when they apply for the new photo ID is extremely dangerous and against the Constitution," Lu said in her letter.
Lu's statement has been seen as a complaint directed at the Cabinet.
But Cho said Lu's comments were aimed at the legislature.
"Lawmakers are now the group of people who are authorized to change the situation. The Cabinet is a government office which will enforce the law," Cho said.
"To me, in reading her letter to the editor, I think she was hoping that her voice could be heard by the legislature," Cho added.
Cho said that the Cabinet had proposed an amendment to Article Eight of the Household Registration Law (
"We have done what we are supposed to. At this moment, if lawmakers do not make any changes, we can only enforce whatever policies are approved by the legislature. We are not authorized to rebut or disobey the law," Cho said.
The current legislative session will conclude next Tuesday. If lawmakers do not approve the amendment before then, fingerprints will be collected anyway when the Ministry of the Interior begins to issue the new IDs from July 1.
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