The Executive Yuan yesterday nominated seven members for the National Communications Commission (NCC), a body tasked with regulating the telecom and broadcasting sectors.
The seven candidates, which must be approved by the legislature, were chosen among “a long list” of names, many of whom turned down offers to serve on the commission because of a new “revolving door clause,” Cabinet spokeswoman Vanessa Shih (史亞平) said yesterday.
The clause added to the NCC’s Organic Law (國家通訊傳播組織法) last year bars NCC members from serving as executives of enterprises related to the NCC’s duties within three years of leaving the commission.
In July 2006 the Council of Grand Justices found the law unconstitutional in part because it stipulates that NCC members should be nominated by political parties in proportion to their number of seats in the legislature.
Some of the NCC members stepped down after the ruling, while others stayed on to complete their three-year term, which ended in January.
At that point the Democratic Progressive Party government decided to postpone the nomination of new members until after the presidential inauguration in May.
Candidate Hsieh Chih-nan (謝進男), formerly a member of the pan-green Taiwan Solidarity Union, was the only incumbent NCC member to be renominated.
Shih declined to comment on why the other four NCC members — chairman Su Yeong-chin (蘇永欽), Howard Shyr (石世豪), Liu Tsung-de (劉宗德) and Lee Tsu-yuan (李祖源) — were not renominated.
The other nominees were Weng Hsiao-ling (翁曉玲), an associate professor of law at the Institute of Law for Science and Technology at National Tsing Hua University; Liu Chorng-jian (劉崇堅), a professor of economics at National Taipei University; Chen Cheng-tsang (陳正倉), a professor of economics at National Taiwan University; Lee Ta-sung (李大嵩), a professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering at National Chiao Tung University; Chang Pao-chi (張寶基), a supervisor at the Department of Electrical Engineering at National Central University; and Chung Chi-hui (鍾起惠), director of the Department of Journalism at Shih Hsin University.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
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