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.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS