Lawmakers yesterday disputed whether amendments to the Assembly and Parade Act (集會遊行法) effectively passed their first reading last week — and they later agreed to put the dispute to cross-party negotiations.
“Let’s act like gentlemen, let’s be gentle,” said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chi Kuo-tung (紀國棟), who presided over a meeting of the legislature’s Internal Administration Committee yesterday.
He urged his colleagues from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) to be “gentle” after opposition lawmakers surrounded Chi, asking him to put the dispute on whether the committee had passed the amendments to cross-party negotiations.
“We’re trying to be gentle, the gentle way of resolving the dispute is to negotiate,” DPP Legislator Chen Ting-fei (陳亭妃) replied.
On Thursday last week, the committee adopted the amendments proposed by DPP Legislator Cheng Li-chun (鄭麗君) and endorsed by 30 other lawmakers in a vote at about 8:45pm, when most of the KMT legislators were absent.
However, KMT legislators overturned the decision in a vote yesterday and then immediately called off the meeting — a move that drew the fire of opposition lawmakers, who called the move “illegitimate.”
Although yesterday’s meeting was scheduled to review other bills, whether the amendments had passed their first reading was still the focus as soon as the meeting began.
As the dispute dragged on, DPP caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) and KMT caucus whip Lin Hung-chih (林鴻池) arrived at the meeting to help negotiate a settlement.
After Lin promised that the KMT would not block the revision of the law and that it would review it once the Executive Yuan delivers its proposals to the legislature, the two sides agreed to settle the dispute in cross-party negotiations at a future date.
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