Some nominees appointed to be Control Yuan members were beneficiaries of political patronage, outgoing Control Yuan President Wang Chien-shien said yesterday, but he added that he did not blame President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).
The controversial roster of 29 candidates for the fifth-term Control Yuan is due to be put to a confirmation vote this week in a possible second extra session in the legislature after a scheduled vote earlier this month failed to proceed due to a boycott by opposition parties.
At a press conference yesterday, Wang described some members of the fourth Control Yuan and nominees for the next terms as vote brokers who influence voters in favor of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in elections and minions of local factions in connection with the KMT.
Photo: Chen Chih-chu, Taipei Times
The KMT was in the process of selecting candidates for the nine-in-one elections scheduled in November when the Presidential Office was drawing up the list of Control Yuan nominees, Wang said.
When Ma was told that someone had to be appointed to be a member at the Control Yuan for the sake of the KMT winning the elections, “did you think that he dared not to do what he was told to do?” Wang said.
Wang said that he did not blame Ma for the list of nominations because anyone would have done the same if they were Ma.
No one could pick 29 people among the nation’s 23 million people who could make good Control Yuan members, Wang said.
Being like Judge Bao (包青天), a Song Dynasty official renowned for his moral uprightness, “is just not in their blood,” he added.
Wang reiterated his analogy that the Control Yuan is like an “appendix,” which is useless and the nation would be better off if the Control Yuan is abolished.
He called on the KMT and the Democratic Progressive Party to jointly initiate an amendment to the Constitution to do away with the institution.
Asked by reporters if he would suggest that the legislature hold off the confirmation vote to effectively render the Control Yuan a non-functional institutional because of the high threshold to pass a constitutional amendment, Wang said he would not, saying that would be unconstitutional.
Wang was asked to give his views on opposition parties urging the KMT to refrain from using party discipline to demand that KMT lawmakers vote to confirm all 29 candidates to allow them to screen out some controversial nominees, but said he would rather not address the matter.
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