The Legislative Yuan’s ability to hold sessions remotely — if the COVID-19 outbreak worsens — was tested yesterday as Legislative Speaker You Si-kun (游錫堃) and Secretary-General Lin Chih-chia (林志嘉) held a teleconference.
While there was some delay in transmission, the video quality was clear, Lin said.
Lin watched as the conference was arranged in a meeting room and then returned to his office to be patched in after You accepted the call in his office.
Photo: Peter Lo, Taipei Times
During the call, You told Lin that planning was necessary to ensure that legislative affairs — the review of bills and budgets — can continue during the outbreak.
No one wishes for the situation to get worse, but one must be prepared, he said, adding that it was possible that Taiwan’s legislature is the first to take such measures.
Lin said that the legislature would also conduct drills on how to vote on motions via teleconference.
The system would be tested for various situations, beginning with a legislative affairs meeting, followed by a Procedure Committee meeting, a standing committee meeting and ultimately, a full floor session, he said.
“We hope not to have to use the system, but we must make what preparations we can,” Lin said.
The system would only be used if the legislative speaker decided — after convening an emergency session of the legislature after two legislators have been tested positive for COVID-19 — to suspend legislative meetings entirely or to conduct some meetings via teleconference, Lin said.
The next two weeks would be critical for the nation’s disease prevention efforts, Lin said, citing Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), and he urged public solidarity.
Taiwan’s ban on foreigners entering the country, effective today, borders on a lockdown of the nation, he said.
Lin also thanked Microsoft for providing the teleconferencing system and hardware, and for helping testing the system yesterday.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS