With a new mixed electoral system being implemented in the year-end legislative election, Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (
The impact of the new system remains to be seen, but the election reform was decided upon with the consensus of all political parties and there is no turning back, Wang said at the International Symposium on Mixed Electoral Systems in East Asia, which was organized by the Election Study Center of National Chengchi University.
It can be both difficult and easy at the same time to imagine how a new electoral system will impact the political environment, Yoshiaki Kobayashi, a professor at Japan's Keio University, said in a keynote speech.
Citing the US 2000 presidential election as an example, Kobayashi said that if former vice president Al Gore, who garnered more popular votes but less electoral votes than US President George W. Bush, had been elected president, the US' response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon would probably have been different.
The new electoral system should change the legislative environment, although there is no way of knowing whether it will be for better or for worse, Wang said.
It is generally agreed that the system favors a two-party system and facilitates political debate, Kobayashi said.
However, 10 years after Japan adopted the system, reviews are mixed, Kobayashi said, adding that some legislators do not believe the mixed voting system is an improvement.
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
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
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