Minister of the Interior Lee Yi-yang (李逸洋) said yesterday that 40,000 police and 29,000 volunteers would be on duty to ensure that voting and vote counting on Saturday proceed smoothly.
"The legislative election on Jan. 12 will be a working day for all police officers across the nation," Lee said at a press conference held after yesterday's Cabinet meeting.
Lee said police agencies in counties and cities had made necessary preparations to ensure the security of voters and the safe transportation of ballots, adding they would prevent anybody from interfering in the process, maintain order at polling stations and stop crowds from causing trouble.
The National Police Agency (NPA) said it had looked into several hundreds of people connected with gangsters who were possibly intending to interfere with the election and that approximately 132 legislative candidates had applied for personal protection from the NPA, Lee said.
At the press conference, Minister of Justice Morley Shih (施茂林) said the number of reported vote-buying cases related to the legislative election exceeded 5,669 and involved more than 10,323 people, both record highs.
Among the reported vote-buying cases, two had been resolved and 14 people had been indicted by prosecutors, Shih said, adding that accelerating the pace of investigations into vote-buying cases would be a future deterrent.
"Previously, the task of cracking down on vote-buying would stop on the eve of election day, but this year we will extend the task to election day. Election day is expected to be a peak period for vote-buying. We will also be on the lookout for how gambling influences the election," Shih said.
Officials with the affected ministries briefed Premier Chang Chun-hsiung (張俊雄) on their preparations for Saturday's poll at yesterday's Cabinet meeting.
The National Information and Communication Security Taskforce presented a report to the Cabinet saying the Central Election Commission (CEC) had set up a vote-counting system independent of the Internet to ensure that vote counting would be secure.
The CEC said last week that its Web site had been hacked on two occasions, in October and last month. The two incidents did no damage to its computer systems, it 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:
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