The pan-blue and pan-green camps yesterday reached a consensus to prioritize the government's budget for the 2008 fiscal year on the agenda for this week's plenary session before the legislature goes into recess on Friday.
The budget bill topped the agenda proposals of both camps at a meeting of the legislative Procedure Committee.
The remainder of the agenda was set only after debate and a vote, in which the pan-blue camp's agenda proposal won with a vote of 16-7.
The pan-blue camp placed a draft amendment to the Organic Law of the National Communications Commission (
The draft stipulates that commission members should be nominated by the Cabinet after a review committee, whose members should be recommended by each party according to their number of legislative seats, reviews their qualifications at public hearings. Candidates for the commission should be recommended by the Cabinet and legislative caucuses.
The commission's members have said they will resign at the end of next month.
Other bills prioritized by the pan-blue camp include a draft amendment to the Offshore Islands Development Law (
Topping the Democratic Progressive Party's agenda proposal was a bill allocating funds for anti-flood measures between next year and 2010; a review of the nation's free-trade agreements with El Salvador and Honduras; and an amendment to the Public Functionary Assets Disclosure Law (
In related news, the legislature yesterday passed an amendment to the Criminal Code (刑法), raising the fine for drunken driving five-fold.
Under the amendment, driving under the influence of alcohol or illegal substances is punishable by one-year imprisonment or a fine of NT$150,000.
The amendment, supported by some 50 legislators across party lines, originally sought to introduce jail sentences of between six months and three years for people who repeat the offense more than three times. That part of the bill was dropped during negotiations.
A similar amendment to the Military Criminal Code (
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift