Standing behind a 21cm stack of more than 2,000 legislative proposals weighing 15kg, Citizen Congress Watch (CCW) executive director Ho Tsung-hsun (何宗勳) criticized the legislature yesterday for delaying review of the proposals until the last three days of this legislative session.
“Suppose the lawmakers take exactly 10 minutes to review each proposal in this pile of papers in front of me. It would take them 19 sleepless days to finish reviewing all of them, but they’re trying to do it within three days” Ho said at a news conference at the group’s office yesterday.
While the legislature had close to five months between the start of the session in September and the end of the session on Tuesday to review bills and central government budgets for the next fiscal year, it waited until the last three days to begin the process.
“[The lawmakers] are certainly inefficient, unprofessional and lazy,” Ho said.
Chen Chien-fu (陳建甫), a CCW board member, accused the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of not serving as a watchdog for the public.
“With an absolute majority, the KMT passes everything that the government proposes — this is not what their job is about,” Chen said. “As lawmakers belonging to the ruling party, they should be very careful about proposals and bills submitted by the government.”
Ho, on the other hand, thinks that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is not working hard enough as opposition.
“The DPP is a minority, but this is no excuse,” Ho said at the news conference. “If they went after inappropriate legislative proposals like they did [former KMT legislator] Diane Lee’s [李慶安] dual citizenship case, things would have been a lot better, and they would have won applause from the public.”
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:
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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