About 500 protesters demonstrated on Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei yesterday, vowing to recall President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and lawmakers in the pan-green camp.
The protesters rallied around several themes, accusing Tsai of rigging the Jan. 11 presidential election, that she “bought” her doctorate at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and that Tsai and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers who pander to her should be recalled.
Democracy Watch Alliance convener Huang Cheng-chung (黃正忠) said that if the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) does not take action on the death of KMT Kaohsiung City Council Speaker Hsu Kun-yuan (許崑源), he would quit the party.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
Hsu, who strongly supported Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), was found dead after falling from his 17th-floor apartment in Kaohsiung on the night of June 6, several hours after the city’s voters cast their ballots in favor of recalling Han.
Huang said that Hsu died a wrongful death, and that yesterday’s rally sought in part to redress the injustice perpetrated against him.
If the KMT “does not have the guts,” he would leave the party and run in the Kaohsiung mayoral by-election to avenge Hsu, said Huang, who is from Kaohsiung.
China Unification Promotion Party (CUPP) chairman Chang An-le (張安樂), who also joined the demonstration, said that Hsu was one of the two politicians in the pan-blue camp that he respected the most — the other one being Jenn Lann Temple (鎮瀾宮) chairman Yen Ching-piao (顏清標).
Han singlehandedly saved the KMT in the 2018 nine-in-one local elections with his rising popularity, but KMT heavyweights, including former KMT chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義), brought him down for their own gain, he said, adding that Han, who ran as the KMT’s presidential candidate in January, could have brought eight years of peace to the Taiwan Strait had he been elected.
“KMT Chairman Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) asked us not to initiate revenge recalls, but that is exactly what we are going to do,” retired Taipei City University of Science and Technology lecturer Chou Ming-tai (周明台) said.
New Power Party Kaohsiung City Councilor Huang Jie (黃捷) and Taiwan Statebuilding Party Legislator Chen Po-wei (陳柏惟) are DPP members in all but name, Chou added.
They, along with DPP Legislator Wang Ting-yu (王定宇) and DPP Taoyuan City Councilor Wang Hao-yu (王浩宇), are all “dregs” that must be tossed out, Chou said, adding that the four politicians — all vocal critics of Han — should be the targets of a revenge recall campaign.
The DPP has announced a Kaohsiung mayoral by-election for Aug. 15, just two months after Han was recalled, even though the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法) states that a by-election should be held within three months of a recall vote, Chou said.
“Give the DPP an inch and it will take a mile,” he said. “The only way to topple the DPP is through a full-on clash.”
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS