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.
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