The Cabinet yesterday approved a draft law that would prohibit judges on the Constitutional Court and other judges at various levels from holding membership in any political party, taking part in any party activities during their tenure or running in elections.
If they want to run for public office, they should resign or retire at least one year before registering their candidacy, the proposed legislation stipulates.
The bill will be referred to the Legislative Yuan for review and approval after being signed by the Judicial Yuan and the Examination Yuan. It was initiated through extensive cross-agency discussion and consultations with academics and judicial experts.
It was also stipulated in the bill that the Judicial Yuan should establish a commission to review the performance of judges to weed out those who are incompetent. The draft also required the Judicial Yuan to set up commissions to review appointments, transfers suspensions and dismissals of judges, as well as merits or punishments, to make the personnel system more transparent.
Meanwhile, the Cabinet yesterday also approved an amendment to the Commodity Tax Act (貨物稅條例) and an amendment to the Vehicle License Tax Act (使用牌照稅法), which would exempt buyers of battery-driven vehicles from the taxes.
Also approved by the Cabinet was a draft to legislate the terms of a UN convention to protect women against all forms of discrimination.
If the draft passes the legislature, government agencies at all levels will be bound by gender equality regulations in line with the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
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