Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) speculated yesterday that pan-blue leaders may have violated an electoral code in their recent negotiations concerning the upcoming mayoral elections.
Lu made the remark in response to a media inquiry on the Dec. 1 meeting between Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) while campaigning at Taipei's Xingtian Temple for Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidates for Taipei City councilor.
Lu said that Ma and Soong may have violated the Public Officials Election and Recall Law (公職人員選舉罷免法) if they talked about dumping a candidate in order to get another elected.
Lu was referring to Article 92 of the Public Officials Election and Recall Law, which stipulates that it is illegal to attempt to affect an election by circulating rumors or false information about any candidate in the form of words, pictures, recorded messages, videotapes, speeches and so forth and thereby cause injury to the public interest.
While many people were curious about what the two had discussed during the meeting, Lu called on Taipei residents to take the matter seriously.
Chen Chien-ming (陳建銘), who is running for Tapei City councilor under the Taiwan Solidarity Union banner, yesterday told a press conference that he would sue Ma and Soong for their secret meeting last Friday.
"After the meeting, a banner that read `send Soong to the Taipei City Government and Ma to the Presidential Office [in 2008]' was shown throughout the city, which means that there must have been some sort of agreement for an exchange," Chen said.
Such an act would be a violation of the Public Officials Election and Recall Law, he said, adding that Soong ought to drop out of the race.
"People should condemn such closed-door politics, as they are unfit for a democracy," he 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:
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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