Members of nearly 20 academic and civic groups have announced that they plan to establish a non-governmental organization tomorrow that seeks to raise "civic awareness" among the public and to promote legislative reform.
The organization, called Citizen Front, will be a new alliance composed of academics and key figures in social movements, including Chien Hsi-chieh (
Other members of Citizen Front include pan-green professors who called for President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) resignation last July, including Fan Yun (范雲), associate professor at National Taiwan University and Lee Ting-tsan (李丁讚), a sociology professor at National Tsinghua University.
Hsieh Tung-ju (
According to Shih Yi-hsiang (施逸翔), a staffer at the Peacetime Foundation, Citizen Front is aimed at bringing the nation closer to the civil societies found northern Europe, where politicians have to meet strict moral and ethical demands from the public.
"The difference between Citizen Front and Citizen Watch [another civic alliance that examines the legislature's performance] is that the former hopes to not only watch over legislators but also offer an ideal legislative prospect," Shih told the Taipei Times yesterday.
Shih said Citizen Front hopes to establish "values that are worth pursuing" and that the organization plans to hold a series of conferences between next month and May as a first step in the process.
Seven conferences will be held to discuss topics such as the nation's environmental problems, government corruption and cross-trait relations under the premises of peace and democracy.
"Taiwanese people do not have enough awareness as citizens," Chu said in a telephone interview yesterday. "People only get to know the government on the surface because their understanding of the government is usually limited as a result of political wrangling [between the pan-green and pan-blue camps]."
Jou said that professors had suggested that the organization recommend outstanding legislative candidates for the nation's political parties before their primary elections.
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
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
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