Eight prospective candidates have registered to run as independents in next year’s presidential election, the Central Election Commission announced yesterday.
They are former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮), Huang Tuo-yu (黃多玉), Lan Hsin-chi (藍信祺), Tseng Kun-ping (曾坤炳), Huang Jung-chang (黃榮章), Yang Shih-kuang (楊世光), Wang Yao-li (王堯力) and Mei Feng (梅峰), according to a list released by the commission.
The candidates must pay a NT$1 million (US$32,258) deposit and have until Nov. 2 to collect 280,384 valid petition signatures in support of their bid — 1.5 percent of the electorate as counted in the 2016 legislative elections, the commission said.
The petitions must be submitted in print, as the commission does not accept petition signatures collected in electronic form, it added.
If a candidate fails to reach half the required amount of signatures, they would lose their deposit, the commission said.
Lu on Tuesday announced that she would run in January’s election as an independent.
Lu served as vice president from 2000 to 2008, and in May last year left the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Huang Tuo-yu said that he is the first monk to register as a presidential candidate.
The former expatriate in South Korea said that he is determined to create another economic miracle for Taiwan.
Lan is a former convict who served 19 years in prison for a high-profile double homicide committed in 1981, when he was 17 years old.
Lan first registered to run for the presidency in 2011 after his release from jail, but his application was rejected.
He launched another signature drive in 2015, but was unable to collect enough signatures and lost his deposit.
Tseng, a judicial reform advocate who has represented the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and was twice elected a Taichung City councilor before joining the DPP, ran for Penghu County comissioner as an independent in 2009.
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:
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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