Pan-blue legislators changed their minds yesterday, accepting the government's proposal to hold an extraordinary legislative session, saying they would put a motion to recall President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) up for review in the session.
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and People First Party (PFP) legislative caucuses held a lunch meeting to discuss the matter.
Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) also convened a cross-party negotiation session on holding an extra session, a motion proposed by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus after many government bills were blocked in the last session because of a proposed amendment on direct links.
The KMT and PFP caucuses said last week that a special session could be held if pan-green legislators agreed to vote on the direct links amendment, in which the government's authority to grant permission for Taiwanese ships and aircraft to travel directly to China would be removed.
But KMT caucus whip Pan Wei-kang (
Pan said that pan-blue caucuses would come up with a motion to hold an extra session to review a proposal to recall the president, the direct links amendment, a government-sponsored budget bill for flood-prevention and two other pan-blue camp amendments.
The last two include an amendment to the Statute Governing Preferential Treatment for Retired Presidents and Vice Presidents (卸任總統副總統禮遇條例), which state that if any of their relatives are charged and convicted with corruption-related crimes, preferential treatment will be canceled.
Pan-blue legislators proposed the amendment in the wake of the detention of the president's son-in-law, Chao Chien-ming (
A pan-blue camp amendment to the Law Governing Legislators' Exercise of Power (立法院職權行使法) would give the legislature investigative powers, enabling it to probe the March 19, 2004 attempt to assassinate the president and vice president, and the construction of Kaohsiung's rapid transit system, among others.
PFP Legislator Chang Hsien-yao (
The agenda suggested by the pan-blue camp was rejected by the DPP legislative caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (
Meanwhile, Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) legislators yesterday visited Minister of Foreign Affairs Morgan Hwang (
"The government has been trying to persuade DPP legislators not to boycott the vote on the direct links amendment in the special session. If this is the case, I am afraid that we won't be able to block the amendment," TSU Legislator Ho Min-hao (何敏豪) said.
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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