Former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairperson Hsu Hsin-liang (許信良) began a one-man protest in front of the Legislative Yuan yesterday and gave President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) a 24-hour deadline to respond to public grievances, threatening an indefinite hunger strike if Ma failed to answer.
Hsu, 70, asked Ma for affirmative responses on three issues — freezing fuel and electricity prices, keeping the ban on US beef imports containing ractopamine residues and a presidential pardon for former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), who is in prison for corruption — before 3pm today.
If Ma failed to respond by that time, Hsu said he would begin an indefinite hunger strike until Ma does.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
“I’m doing this because there is no way in Taiwan today that a disqualified president can be brought down and because Ma refuses to listen to the people,” Hsu said.
Hsu said he thought Ma should have responded to public suffering in his inauguration speech yesterday after Saturday’s massive protest organized by the DPP.
“A president of a true democracy could not possibly refuse to listen to the public. A democracy with an authoritarian leader is not a true democracy,” he said.
Since there was no feasible method to replace the president, despite an approval rate of 15 percent, and because recalling Ma was unlikely to work, Hsu said the only thing he could do was to “resort to an intensified individual protest and hope that people would follow my lead to force a change.”
Hsu, who is one of five candidates in the DPP chair-person election on Sunday, denied that his protest was a campaign tactic.
ECHOVIRUS 11: The rate of enterovirus infections in northern Taiwan increased last week, with a four-year-old girl developing acute flaccid paralysis, the CDC said Two imported cases of chikungunya fever were reported last week, raising the total this year to 13 cases — the most for the same period in 18 years, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday. The two cases were a Taiwanese and a foreign national who both arrived from Indonesia, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The 13 cases reported this year are the most for the same period since chikungunya was added to the list of notifiable communicable diseases in October 2007, she said, adding that all the cases this year were imported, including 11 from
Prosecutors in New Taipei City yesterday indicted 31 individuals affiliated with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) for allegedly forging thousands of signatures in recall campaigns targeting three Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers. The indictments stem from investigations launched earlier this year after DPP lawmakers Su Chiao-hui (蘇巧慧) and Lee Kuen-cheng (李坤城) filed criminal complaints accusing campaign organizers of submitting false signatures in recall petitions against them. According to the New Taipei District Prosecutors Office, a total of 2,566 forged recall proposal forms in the initial proposer petition were found during the probe. Among those
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) today condemned the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after the Czech officials confirmed that Chinese agents had surveilled Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) during her visit to Prague in March last year. Czech Military Intelligence director Petr Bartovsky yesterday said that Chinese operatives had attempted to create the conditions to carry out a demonstrative incident involving Hsiao, going as far as to plan a collision with her car. Hsiao was vice president-elect at the time. The MAC said that it has requested an explanation and demanded a public apology from Beijing. The CCP has repeatedly ignored the desires
The Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant’s license has expired and it cannot simply be restarted, the Executive Yuan said today, ahead of national debates on the nuclear power referendum. The No. 2 reactor at the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant in Pingtung County was disconnected from the nation’s power grid and completely shut down on May 17, the day its license expired. The government would prioritize people’s safety and conduct necessary evaluations and checks if there is a need to extend the service life of the reactor, Executive Yuan spokeswoman Michelle Lee (李慧芝) told a news conference. Lee said that the referendum would read: “Do
RSS