Former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) continued to offer sharp critiques of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) leadership yesterday, saying that she believed the party was becoming more “undemocratic.”
“The DPP has been beaten by the ‘democratic regressive party,’” she said of the DPP National Congress, which passed a controversial change on Saturday phasing out a party member vote in primaries. “It has already become a blemish on the [party’s] history.”
She also said that Legislator Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) was “not that important,” after the DPP caucus whip proposed that a future presidential nomination should be settled through a party-wide consensus.
Lu and her backers show no sign of stopping their criticism despite the revision being overwhelmingly passed by party delegates.
Future election nominations will be settled solely through public telephone polls, replacing a party member vote.
Following a visit to former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) in Taipei Prison yesterday, Lu said that he agreed with her.
“Chen pointed out that it was a very serious issue if a political party no longer needed its members,” she said. “It’s democracy going backwards.”
The DPP and by extension Tsai, should not underestimate party members’ anger at seeing their votes taken away, Lu said.
A statement by former presidential adviser Koo Kwang-ming’s (辜寬敏) office staff released yesterday compared Tsai to President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), saying the two were becoming “more and more alike.”
“Tsai, backed by public polls, has become a media darling ... she has so much self-confidence that she believes she can successfully ram through [revisions] without any communication,” said office director Lin Yi-cheng (林宜正), a former DPP deputy secretary-general.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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