The Cabinet yesterday repeated its determination to proceed with the collection of fingerprint data for updated national identification cards, but said it would stop collecting the material immediately if the legislature amended the Household Registration Law (戶籍法) or the Council of Grand Justices ordered it to do so.
"The Cabinet will carry out its policies within the law, no matter what happens," Cabinet Spokesman Cho Jung-tai (
Cho's remarks referred to a Democratic Progressive Party decision to file an application to the Council of Grand Justices to test the constitutionality of collecting fingerprint data. The newly designed cards are to be issued after July 1.
Cho said the Cabinet would immediately cease the process of collecting fingerprints should the justices decide that the law is unconstitutional.
Asked what the government would do with fingerprint data already collected if the justices order the government to halt the program, Cho said it would be regarded as "invalid" information and be destroyed.
"The appropriate government agencies must be very careful on this issue because there remains a risk of confidential information being leaked," he said.
Cho said that the government would also immediately suspend the policy if the legislature rejects Article Eight of the Household Registration Law, which authorizes the collection of fingerprint data.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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