Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) said yesterday the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had yet to pass the threshold that would enable it to propose a presidential recall.
Wang told reporters that the DPP, which now has 28 out of the legislature’s 113 seats, would still need to garner the support of one more legislator if it wanted to propose unseating President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).
Wang made the remarks after the DPP, buoyed by its win in the legislative by-election in Yunlin County, said it now had enough seats in the legislature to propose Ma’s recall.
DPP caucus whip Chai Trong-rong (蔡同榮) said he favored recalling Ma if the DPP had enough seats — a quarter of all legislators — to initiate a proposal.
Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘), head of the DPP’s Policy Research Committee, said the threshold of initiation of the proposal should be 28 since there are currently only 112 lawmakers.
The Central Election Commission still needs to hold a by-election in Nantou since the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) is now premier.
KMT caucus secretary-general Lu Hsueh-chang (呂學樟) urged the DPP to refrain from taking an opportunity to humiliate Ma.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
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XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods