Citizen Congress Watch (CCW) yesterday panned government officials over their refusal to attend legislative meetings when requested by the Legislative Yuan, while also calling for legislation to regulate attendance of officials.
The legislature’s Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee requested the presence of several Special Investigation Division (SID) officials — including Director Yang Jung-tsung (楊榮宗), Prosecutor Cheng Shen-yuan (鄭深元), and Attorney Investigators Ho Chi-fei (何其非) and Lin Fang-yi (林芳怡) — to attend a meeting on Thursday on a improper wiretapping case, but none of them attended.
Prosecutor General Haung Shih-ming (黃世銘) has argued that prosecutors have no obligation to report to the legislature over an isolated case, triggering more discontent from the legislators, who vowed to request their presence again next week.
CCW executive director Chang Hung-lin (張宏林) yesterday disagreed with Huang, and accused officials of disrespecting the legislature.
“Prosecutors have the right to carry out their jobs without interference. However, the meeting is more about policy direction and budget rather than about an individual case,” Chang said through a press release. “Yang, who is the SID director that has power over execution of policies and budgets, should respect the legislature and attend the meeting.”
Chang said that it is not the first time that officials turned down a request from the legislature to attend meetings, but the legislature cannot do anything about it, since there is no penalty for it.
In the current legislative session, Council for Economic Planning and Development Minister Kuan Chung-min (管中閔) and Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp chairman Ou Chin-der (歐晉德) have not attended legislative meetings as requested without notifying and obtaining permission form the legislature, Chang said, adding that in the past, during the former Democratic Progressive Party’s administration, then-education minister Tu Cheng-sheng (杜正勝) was absent at legislative meetings for as many as 12 times, prompting the legislature to pass five resolutions condemning his absence.
“We think it’s necessary to make a legislation on the performance of officials whose attendance has been requested by the legislature and that stipulates a penalty for those who refuse to attend without justification,” Chang 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
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