Premier Chang Chun-hsiung (張俊雄) announced yesterday that he would continue to serve as premier "for political stability" and that most of his Cabinet members would also stay on, after President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) rejected his resignation.
Chang resigned from the position on Thursday following a tradition set by previous premiers following the election of a new legislature.
However, with only three months left of his presidential term, Chen decided to reject Chang's resignation in order to avoid any more political upheaval, the Central News Agency reported.
Chang accepted Chen's decision and said that most of his team would stay as well.
"My Cabinet team knows my leadership style well," Chang said when approached for comment outside his residence. "I think they will stay on with me."
As for the vacancies left by former Cabinet members who were elected to the legislature, "those vacancies will be filled with lawmakers who failed in their re-election bids," Chang said.
Meanwhile, Chang confirmed that Government Information Office Minister Shieh Jhy-wey (謝志偉) and Minister of Education Tu Cheng-sheng (杜正勝) would stay on.
Shieh and Tu resigned before the Cabinet did so en masse, after Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) and several other Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) members said that the two, along with Ministry of Education chief secretary Chuang Kuo-jung (莊國榮), were partly responsible for the party's defeat in the legislative elections because of their "controversial" behavior.
In related news, Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (
"Rejecting the [Cabinet's] resignation is more acceptable. It would be wrong for the president to accept [Chang's] resignation and then appoint a new premier only months before the presidential election," Wang said yesterday outside the Central Election Commission, where he was accompanying Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) as he registered his candidacy.
Constitutional convention stipulates that the Cabinet resign when a new legislature is elected and gives the president the power to choose a new premier without requiring the consent of the new legislature.
Establishing a new constitutional convention, as Chen has suggested, would eliminate the problem of a Cabinet forming twice in the space of three months, once when the new legislature is sworn in on Feb. 1 and again when the new president is inaugurated on May 20.
Rejecting the resignation and making the Cabinet a "caretaker Cabinet" presenting policies and bills through cross-party negotiations was more reasonable, Wang said.
Wang said the Constitution did not require the premier to resign after a new legislature was elected.
Meanwhile, two academics yesterday criticized the DPP caucus' move to seek a constitutional interpretation on the new "single district, two-vote" electoral voting system.
At a forum in Taipei, National Taiwan University political science professor Chang Lin-cheng (張麟徵) said it was "strange" for the caucus to pursue the interpretation, adding that such a move would give the public a negative impression as the new system had been "co-authored" by the DPP and the KMT.
"The DPP should have been able to foresee the [legislative elections] result [under the new system]," she said, adding that the new system should not be reviewed until it had been used at least twice.
"Is it reasonable for those who lose the game to seek to change the rules of the competition?" she asked.
Chang made the comments after the DPP caucus on Friday began a signature drive to seek a constitutional interpretation on the grounds that the new system was unfair because of the large variations in the sizes of the populations in the different constituencies.
The caucus is expected to hold a meeting today to promote the signature drive.
George Tsai (
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