The Appendectomy Project yesterday called on people to participate next Saturday in the voting to recall Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Alex Tsai (蔡正元).
Students participating in the rally in Taipei’s Neihu District (內湖) wore costumes made from trash bags, a silent retort to Tsai’s comments last year that the college students starting the campaign were “trash.”
The campaign’s student representative Tseng Kuang-chih (曾光志) said that the costumes were sending the message that they were not the trash, but trash bags without the trash.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
Tseng called on all residents of the Neihu and Nangang districts (南港) to cast their vote regardless of whether they support the campaign.
“Voting is the most direct implementation of direct democracy,” Tseng said, adding a broad invitation for residents to join events held on Saturday at Dahu Park and on Sunday in front of the Presidential Office Building to “celebrate the victory of democracy.”
Taiwan currently employs the system of representative democracy, though there have been calls in recent years calling for a transition to direct democracy, citing what critics have described as the impotence of democratically elected representatives.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
Academia Sinica researcher Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) also called on the residents of the two districts to show up at what he called “the most important event in Taiwanese democratic history.”
Huang also urged the Taipei City Government to be on the ball and see that residents in the two districts who are eligible to vote get their ballots, adding that if the residents have not received their ballots by Thursday, they should ask their borough wardens about it.
“Do not allow others to take away your right to vote,” Huang said.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
Writer Neil Peng (馮光遠) said he had not expected to see the next-generation successors to the spirit of the Constitution 133 Alliance, which started to recall legislators in 2013, adding that he would make an appearance to back the movement.
However, Peng said that the nation might have to look into the threshold for recall, as it was too high.
The fourth constituency in Taipei, comprising Neihu and Nangang districts, held 299,257 individuals of eligible voting age.
According to the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公務人員選舉罷免法), more than half of the eligible voting population must vote in the recall, or 149,764 people, with the vote supporting the recall amongst all valid ballots reaching or exceeding half, or 74,882 votes, for the recall to be substantiated.
The name of the recall campaign is a play on words since the term for pan-blue lawmakers in Chinese, lan wei (藍委), is homophonous with the word for “appendix” (闌尾).
The campaign ostensibly seeks to sort the wheat from the chaff by recalling legislators whom the campaign singled out as having failed the public by following only President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) instructions.
To date, only KMT legislators have been targeted.
China has reserved offshore airspace in the Yellow Sea and East China Sea from March 27 to May 6, issuing alerts usually used to warn of military exercises, although no such exercises have been announced, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported yesterday. Reserving such a large area for 40 days without explanation is an “unusual step,” as military exercises normally only last a few days, the paper said. These alerts, known as Notice to Air Missions (Notams), “are intended to inform pilots and aviation authorities of temporary airspace hazards or restrictions,” the article said. The airspace reserved in the alert is
NAMING SPAT: The foreign ministry called on Denmark to propose an acceptable solution to the erroneous nationality used for Taiwanese on residence permits Taiwan has revoked some privileges for Danish diplomatic staff over a Danish permit that lists “Taiwan” as “China,” Eric Huang (黃鈞耀), head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Department of European Affairs, told a news conference in Taipei yesterday. Reporters asked Huang whether the Danish government had responded to the ministry’s request that it correct the nationality on Danish residence permits of Taiwanese, which has been listed as “China” since 2024. Taiwan’s representative office in Denmark continues to communicate with the Danish government, and the ministry has revoked some privileges previously granted to Danish representatives in Taiwan and would continue to review
More than 6,000 Taiwanese students have participated in exchange programs in China over the past two years, despite the Mainland Affairs Council’s (MAC) “orange light” travel advisory, government records showed. The MAC’s publicly available registry showed that Taiwanese college and university students who went on exchange programs across the Strait numbered 3,592 and 2,966 people respectively. The National Immigration Agency data revealed that 2,296 and 2,551 Chinese students visited Taiwan for study in the same two years. A review of the Web sites of publicly-run universities and colleges showed that Taiwanese higher education institutions continued to recruit students for Chinese educational programs without
The first bluefin tuna of the season, brought to shore in Pingtung County and weighing 190kg, was yesterday auctioned for NT$10,600 (US$333.5) per kilogram, setting a record high for the local market. The auction was held at the fish market in Donggang Fishing Harbor, where the Siaoliouciou Island-registered fishing vessel Fu Yu Ching No. 2 delivered the “Pingtung First Tuna” it had caught for bidding. Bidding was intense, and the tuna was ultimately jointly purchased by a local restaurant and a local company for NT$10,600 per kilogram — NT$300 ,more than last year — for a total of NT$2.014 million. The 67-year-old skipper
RSS