Vice President Annette Lu (
"We deeply regret that both the media and the opposition parties have misconstrued the vice president's well-intentioned concern over the issue in a negative manner," a statement issued by Lu's office yesterday afternoon said.
The statement said that Lu had told Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (
Ma declined to comment on reports that he had personally told the media that the vice president had inquired "with a smile" about the KMT's plans to impeach the president.
The KMT chairman also denied speculation that his party would seek the cooperation of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers who belonged to former premier Frank Hsieh's (
"Vice President Lu has always been nice and gentle to people. The term `with a smile' doesn't mean anything," he said yesterday before presiding over a municipal meeting.
Ma's remarks have generated speculation that Lu may be pleased at the prospect that Chen could be impeached.
The Chinese-language United Daily News claimed that certain high-ranking KMT officials saw Lu's "cheerfulness" as a sign that she backed the move.
Opposition party lawmakers threatened to impeach Chen after the president announced that the National Unification Council would "cease to function" and that the national unification guidelines would "cease to apply."
While Ma has switched his position from opposing the impeachment proposal to publicly endorsing it, he yesterday denied the party will seek cooperation from DPP lawmakers.
"I have not heard anyone talking about [cooperating with the DPP lawmakers] ... The timeline for the impeachment is not finalized yet. We will announce the decision once a detailed plan has been mapped out," he said.
Meanwhile, the KMT will hold a mass march in Taipei on March 12 to question the legitimacy of Chen's decision on the council with the theme, "Fight for livelihoods, fight for the economy and find a way out."
"The economy is what concerns people most right now. We want to send a message to President Chen and hope that the government will cease fire over the issue of unification or independence and focus their efforts on improving people's lives," KMT spokeswoman Cheng Li-wen (
The KMT had originally planned to stage a rally on March 19 to observe the anniversary of the attempted assassination of the president and vice president, which the party argues was a political plot staged to help Chen secure the 2004 presidential election.
After Chen announced his decision on the council and guidelines on Feb. 28, however, the party decided to move the protest forward and appeal for public support for an end to the unification versus independence debate.
KMT caucus whip Pan Wei-kang (
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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