The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is planning a massive protest next month against what it says are President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) poor performance and his failure to listen to the public.
The DPP’s Central Standing Committee unanimously approved a resolution to authorize the establishment of a “520 task force” to plan for a massive rally around May 20, when Ma will be inaugurated for his second term, DPP spokesperson Lin Yu-chang (林右昌) said yesterday.
The committee decided that a protest was necessary because “Taiwanese are having a difficult time with their lives and cannot stand the Ma administration’s incompetence, injustice and its failure to listen to the voice of the people,” Lin said.
“That is why we are ready to take to the streets to voice our displeasure and protest, and to make the public’s anger visible to the president,” he added.
The task force, convened by DPP Legislator Pan Men-an (潘孟安), will study the appropriate date and location of the protest, given that the Taipei City Government has designated a large area around the Presidential Office as a restricted zone on May 20.
With the announcement, the DPP appears to have changed its tack, with interim DPP Chairperson Chen Chu (陳菊) earlier saying that the DPP, as a rational political party, would try to monitor the government in the legislature first and consider demonstrating as a last resort.
Through another unanimous resolution, the party reiterated its call for judicial and medical rights for ailing former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), who is serving a 17-and-a-half-year sentence for corruption, and insisted that the former president should be granted a release for medical treatment, Lin said.
According to the Constitution, only the president has the power to grant a presidential pardon, he said.
Representatives of various civic groups met Chen before the committee meeting, demanding the DPP restore the former president’s reputation and party membership, and support the petition for a presidential pardon.
The representatives also called on the DPP to lift a ban on its party members and legislators from signing an amnesty petition for Chen.
The DPP did not respond to the appeal.
The committee gave the DPP legislative caucus two more tasks — to promote legislation to designate April 7 as Freedom of Speech Day in honor of late democracy advocate Deng Nan-jung (鄭南榕) and to monitor the operations of state-run companies following controversial fuel and electricity price rises, Lin said.
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
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
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