As a complementary measure to the halving of the number of legislative seats, the legislature on Friday passed 11 amendments to internal regulations.
It also passed an attached resolution limiting government subsidies for individual legislators and party caucuses to NT$400,000 and NT$500,000 per month respectively, as well as limiting overtime and other fees to NT$80,000 and NT$100,000 per month respectively.
Other bills that were passed included the Amendment to Some Articles of the Organic Law of the Legislative Yuan (立法院組織法) and the Amendment to Article 53 of the Budget Act (預算法).
The amendment to regulations for organizing a legislative party caucus states that the five parties with the highest number of elected legislators among all parties with at least three elected legislators will be allowed to establish party caucuses.
If two or more parties have the same number of legislators, lots will decide which parties will be allowed to establish caucuses. It also specifies that five is the highest allowed number of legislative caucuses and that if there are less than five caucuses, a group of four or more legislators will be allowed to establish "political caucuses."
Acknowledging that bad behavior of legislators often leads to disputes, an amendment regulating the suspension of legislators was added to the organizational regulations for the Legislature's Discipline Committee (立法院紀律委員會組織規程) in an attempt to strengthen self-discipline in the legislature.
If two-thirds of all legislators agree, a legislator may be suspended for between three and six months, and during this time he or she will not receive the annual salary and government subsidies, currently NT$180,000 per month. In addition, the legislator may not enter the legislative floor or legislative committees, while his or her voting rights and rights to be elected may also be suspended.
The number of legislative committee members will also be reduced, from between 108 and 120 members to between 88 and 96 members. Anyone who has served in the legislature for 20 years and is over the age of 50 can retire and choose to receive the retirement fund in one payment or in monthly installments, and this will not be bound by the regulations in the Civil Servant Retirement Law (公務人員退休法施行細則).
Anyone choosing voluntary retirement from Feb. 1 can get seven months' salary in severance pay, and for each month they stay on, that severance pay will be reduced by one month.
For anyone taking up another government job within seven months of retirement, the hiring agency shall deduct pay for the corresponding number of months for which severance pay was received.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the