The recall campaign against Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Wu Yu-sheng (吳育昇) has entered its final countdown, with the campaign initiator yesterday calling for signatures from the public to help it pass the second phase of the recall process.
The Constitution 133 Alliance in August last year initiated the campaign to recall Wu, who it said was committed to partisan voting and ignored public opinion in the legislature.
Wu represents the constituency in New Taipei City’s (新北市) six districts, namely Sanjhih (三芝), Shihmen (石門), Tamsui (淡水), Bali (八里), Linkou (林口) and Taishan (泰山).
The alliance on Dec. 26 last year completed the first phase of the recall process by submitting about 6,400 signatures, representing 2 percent of the electorate required by the Central Election Commission.
The 30-day second phase began on Jan. 2 and is set to conclude on Saturday next week, the third day of the six-day Lunar New Year break, by which time the campaign needs to gather and submit at least 37,000 signatures.
The alliance said it was a strategy of the commission to drag the second phase into the Lunar New Year break, which would make it more difficult for the alliance to collect signatures.
The alliance said that as of yesterday, it believes it is still short of about 10,000 signatures, urging members of the public to help it collect signatures by the deadline of Saturday next week.
Taiwan Solidarity Union Secretary-General Lin Chih-chia (林志嘉) told a press conference yesterday that the party has gathered 8,800 signatures, a target that it had promised to the alliance.
The Democratic Progressive Party, which promised the alliance that it would gather 24,000 signatures, said yesterday that so far it has about 10,000.
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
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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