Protesters marched against New Power Party (NPP) Executive Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) yesterday in New Taipei City’s Sijhih District (汐止), as efforts to recall the legislator continued.
Setting off from Sijhih Railway Station, hundreds of protesters in white shirts slowed traffic as they wound their way to Huang’s local office, pausing there briefly before returning to the station while calling for Huang to step down.
“This is a democratic war,” Greater Taipei Stability Power Alliance chairman Sun Chi-cheng (孫繼正) said.
“Have voters ever given Huang the authority to push for homosexual marriage? He is ignoring public opinion,” alliance secretary-general, Yu Hsin-yi (游信義) said, adding that he needed to “listen and change his arrogant attitude.”
Yu is a former legislative candidate for the Faith and Hope League, a party opposing marriage equality that did not win seats in last year’s elections.
Sun said Huang brought “disorder” to society in debates over new labor rules and the service trade agreement with China.
There has been a movement since December last year to recall Huang over his support for marriage equality, shortly after the passage of amendments to the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法) that lowered recall thresholds.
Activists passed the first stage petition signature threshold to begin the recall process within the same month and now must collect another 25,119 signatures before a recall vote could be held.
“We are still collecting signatures and hope that today’s large event can help us break through,” Sun said, estimating that the organizers are about 10,000 signatures short of the next threshold.
At a separate news conference celebrating the first anniversary of the NPP’s Hsinchu headquarters, Huang said his support for marriage equality was “unshakeable.”
“Supporting marriage equality has always been my stance as a legal scholar, and I made an open promise on the issue during the legislative elections,” he said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS