Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lu Hsueh-chang (呂學樟) yesterday withdrew proposals to freeze the operational funding of the Tainan District Prosecutors Office and the Pingtung District Prosecutors’ Office, but said that he plans to put prosecutors “who have abused their power of prosecution” under investigation by the Control Yuan.
After a KMT caucus meeting yesterday morning, Lu, at a press conference alongside KMT Legislator Alex Fai (費鴻泰), announced he would no longer seek to freeze operational funds of NT$24 million (US$762,400) and NT$11 million for Tainan and Pingtung district prosecutors’ offices respectively.
Lu said he made the decision so as, “not to involve innocent prosecutors [by punishing the whole office] for the behavior of a minority of prosecutors.”
Lu instead requested the Ministry of Justice to put the prosecutors in question under investigation by the Control Yuan and the Ministry of Justice’s Prosecutors Evaluation Committee.
Lu said that the proposals to freeze the funding were out of concerns that the Tainan and Pingtung prosecutors’ offices had been abusing their powers.
Lu said this was evidenced by a corruption case the Tainan office initiated against Tainan City Council Speaker Lee Chuan-chiao (李全教) of the KMT, which he alleged was an effort to invalidate lee’s election victory and was brought about by pressure from local Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) politicians.
He also said the prosecutors’ offices had intervened in last year’s nine-in-one elections by detaining a KMT party official over a piece of campaign material that was said to be defamatory.
As he had not demanded action against Ting Hsin International Group (頂新集團) in his proposals, “DPP lawmakers have been smearing me on the Internet for political reasons,” Lu said, alluding to an allegation made by DPP Legislator Lin Shu-fen (林淑芬) on Facebook that Lu’s proposal to take action against the Tainan District Prosecutors’ Office was motivated by its handling of the Ting Hsin food scandal which led to the KMT’s trouncing in the local election.
Other DPP lawmakers have also accused Lu of illegitimate intervention in individual judicial cases.
All of the district prosecutors’ offices have had 10 percent of their budget frozen — a resolution made by the Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee — Lu said, adding that the freeze would be lifted after the offices submit a report at the next plenary session.
Fai emphasized that every legislative caucus has a similar process for lawmakers’ proposals, which must first be generally well-respected and then signed for them to be discussed in cross-party negotiations.
“During budget negotiations, Lin and [DPP Legislator] Chen Ting-fei (陳亭妃) tabled many proposals for budget cuts and freezes, approved by the DPP caucus,” Fai said. “The KMT caucus publicly denounces their disrespect toward other lawmakers’ proposals and online mudslinging.”
In related news, Lu on Wednesday slammed DPP and the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) lawmakers’ proposals to slash educational subsidies for children of retired military personnel, civil servants and public-school teachers and the group’s year-end bonuses, claiming that the aim of the proposals was “to fabricate class struggle to win votes.”
He also mentioned the six firefighters who perished in a blaze in Greater Taoyuan, saying it was “almost unbearable to think of these firefighters [when seeing these lawmakers’ proposals].”
DPP Legislator Yu Mei-nu (尤美女), one of the proposers, panned Lu for his “confusing” remarks.
“What we have proposed is the scrapping of the year-end bonuses for the retired military personnel, civil servants and teachers and the educational subsidies for their children, while the deceased firefighters were not retired civil servants... It is simply unacceptable that when the whole nation is mourning the passing of the firefighters, there is a lawmaker trying to cash in on the tragedy,” Yu said.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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