Gay rights activists yesterday announced that they would form a voting bloc to support gay-friendly candidates in the upcoming legislative by-election in Taipei City’s Da-an District (大安).
“We’ve had six gay pride parades in Taipei in the past six years and more than 18,000 people took part in last year’s event — that’s where the voters are,” chief coordinator of last year’s gay pride parade, Lee Ming-chao (李明照), told a news conference.
“In the process of mobilizing the gay and lesbian community in Taipei, we estimated that around 10 percent of voters in Da-an District are gay — including myself. We can surely become a deciding minority if we stand together.”
He predicted that the turnout for the by-election would be lower than the 60.47 percent for last year’s legislative election.
“I’ve observed that Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] voters are not as interested in the by-election because they are not happy about how the party handled [former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator] Diane Lee’s (李慶安) dual citizenship case, so the turnout could be lower,” Lee Ming-chao said.
He said his group would come up with a list of recommended candidates and mobilize gay voters to support them.
“Recommendations will be made based on whether the candidate supports the six gay-friendly policy goals we have raised, and the candidate’s past record and performance in supporting gay rights,” Lee said.
The six policy goals are: supporting minority sexuality rights, supporting an anti-discrimination bill for all minority groups, supporting freedom of sexual expression, opposing police abuse of minority groups, supporting rights for gay partners and supporting inclusion of gay partners in the welfare system.
After asking all seven registered candidates to sign the six-policy agreement, four returned with a positive response — Wen Ping-yuan (溫炳原) of the Green Party Taiwan, Chou Po-ya (周柏雅) of the Democratic Progressive Party, Chiang Nai-shin (蔣乃辛) of the KMT and the non-partisan candidate Liu Yi-chun (劉義鈞).
Of the four, Wen and Chou attended yesterday’s press conference. While Chou reiterated that he would continue to fight for gay and lesbian rights if elected, Wen panned Chiang for not doing enough for the gay community during his seven terms as Taipei City councilor.
Liya Chu (朱如茵), whose parents are New York-based Taiwanese restaurateurs, has been crowned the champion of US television cooking competition MasterChef Junior, after wowing the judges, including celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, with a feast of fusion cuisine. In the finale of the show’s eighth season, broadcast on Thursday, Chu walked away with US$100,000 after serving a spread of spiced duck breast with scallion pancakes and miso eggplant, followed by coconut pandan panna cotta with a passion fruit coulis and sesame tuille. Chu, who was 10 years old at the time of filming three years ago, faced off against then-11-year-old Grayson Price from
A university student has gained the spotlight for an interactive map he designed detailing all of China’s military bases and installations throughout the Indo-Pacific region. Soochow University music student Joseph Wen (溫約瑟), who calls himself an amateur military enthusiast, said he created the map to “help people better understand the cross-strait situation.” Wen originally posted the map online on June 14 last year, but it gained greater attention after he mentioned it during an appearance on a China Television talk show. On the show, Wen said he had gathered information on the locations from publicly available Web sites, as
GLOBAL STRATEGY: Indo-Pacific alliances need reinforcement to prevent Chinese occupation of Taiwan, which would threaten Japan, Hawaii and Australia, Pompeo said The US should officially recognize Taiwan as a free, independent nation and establish official diplomatic ties, former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo told an event at the Hudson Institute in Washington on Friday. Every US president since Harry Truman has considered Taiwan’s existence to be of utmost importance to US national security, Pompeo said. Taiwan is a principal US partner in technology and economic matters, and if China were to capture Taiwan’s semiconductor supply chain, it would severely hamper the US economy, Pompeo said. Should China occupy Taiwan, it would severely weaken US influence in the Indo-Pacific region and its surrounding areas,
Opening-day ticket sales for a horror exhibition at the Tainan Art Museum were suspended twice on Saturday as the show attracted too many visitors. Titled “Ghosts and Hells: The Underworld in Asian art,” the exhibition runs until Oct. 16. It is the local version of a show that debuted at the Musee du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris. It was planned and curated by Julien Rousseau. The Tainan museum said that within an hour of its doors opening, more than 1,000 people had entered the exhibition. By noon, 3,000 physical and virtual tickets had been sold, while the museum had more than 4,000