A screening panel at the Presidential Office has selected 40 candidates from more than 200 hopefuls for possible Control Yuan posts, sources said on Wednesday.
The sources said the Presidential Office had received more than 200 recommendation letters prior to the June 5 deadline.
The screening panel held its first meeting on Wednesday to review the letters and came up with a tentative short list of 40 candidates.
The short list was agreed on by all members, the sources said, adding that selection work was in the final stages.
The panel is to present a final list to President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) for reference in the next few days, the sources said.
Ma will then select from the list 29 candidates for Control Yuan seats, including the president and vice president of the body, which is the government’s supreme watchdog tasked with monitoring conduct of political appointees, elected officials and senior civil servants.
The president is scheduled to submit the Control Yuan nomination list to the Legislative Yuan on June 23 for review.
The Control Yuan seats have been empty since the term of office of the previous members expired on Jan. 31, 2005, after the pan-blue camp refused to review former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) nominees.
Presidential Office spokesman Wang Yu-chi (王郁琦) declined to comment on the recommendation list for Control Yuan seats. He was also tight-lipped on reports that Ma would nominate former minister of finance Wang Chien-hsien to head the oversight body.
Earlier media reports said former National Chinan University president Lee Chia-tung (李家同) and Chien Hsi-chieh, chief executive of the Peacetime Foundation of Taiwan, had been tapped for Control Yuan posts, but the screening panel declined to confirm the reports.
China has reserved offshore airspace in the Yellow Sea and East China Sea from March 27 to May 6, issuing alerts usually used to warn of military exercises, although no such exercises have been announced, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported yesterday. Reserving such a large area for 40 days without explanation is an “unusual step,” as military exercises normally only last a few days, the paper said. These alerts, known as Notice to Air Missions (Notams), “are intended to inform pilots and aviation authorities of temporary airspace hazards or restrictions,” the article said. The airspace reserved in the alert is
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
A bipartisan group of US senators has introduced a bill to enhance cooperation with Taiwan on drone development and to reduce reliance on supply chains linked to China. The proposed Blue Skies for Taiwan Act of 2026 was introduced by Republican US senators Ted Cruz and John Curtis, and Democratic US senators Jeff Merkley and Andy Kim. The legislation seeks to ease constraints on Taiwan-US cooperation in uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), including dependence on China-sourced components, limited access to capital and regulatory barriers under US export controls, a news release issued by Cruz on Wednesday said. The bill would establish a "Blue UAS
More than 6,000 Taiwanese students have participated in exchange programs in China over the past two years, despite the Mainland Affairs Council’s (MAC) “orange light” travel advisory, government records showed. The MAC’s publicly available registry showed that Taiwanese college and university students who went on exchange programs across the Strait numbered 3,592 and 2,966 people respectively. The National Immigration Agency data revealed that 2,296 and 2,551 Chinese students visited Taiwan for study in the same two years. A review of the Web sites of publicly-run universities and colleges showed that Taiwanese higher education institutions continued to recruit students for Chinese educational programs without
RSS