Lawmakers from the legislature’s Education and Culture Committee yesterday asked the Sports Affairs Council (SAC) to quickly draw up a law specifically governing sports lotteries.
Taipei Fubon Bank is scheduled to begin the sports lotteries tomorrow. Currently, the government uses the Statute Governing Public Welfare Lotteries (公益彩券發行條例) as the legal basis for sports lotteries.
The statute dictates that profits from public welfare lotteries are to be used to fund welfare programs only, such as the National Pension Fund and the National Health Insurance system.
The council originally planned to amend the statute to allow 80 percent of the profits earned from sports lotteries to be used to fund sports. However, the proposed amendment was vetoed by the legislature’s Finance Committee on Monday.
On the same day, the Finance Committee also passed a resolution to postpone the sport lotteries because of an unresolved controversy over the appropriation of the earnings.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Nancy Chao (趙麗雲), a former SAC minister, said the sports lotteries were planned to help raise funds for the SAC, whose annual budget accounts for less than 0.4 percent of the government’s entire budget.
Chao said that 62 percent of the SAC budget is used to improve sports infrastructure, leaving only a small portion to pay for training athletes.
Chao also said that the sports lotteries were created to put an end to the betting scandals surrounding the nation’s professional baseball league.
However, Taipei Fubon Bank announced earlier that the nation’s professional baseball league would not be open for betting during the initial stage of the lotteries. Rather, the lotteries would mainly cover overseas baseball, basketball and soccer games, such as US Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and soccer leagues in England, Japan and other countries.
The nation’s Olympic baseball contests would be listed as a betting item in August, it said.
Chao said that although the sports lotteries were supposed to help the nation’s sports industry, not a single dollar would go to sports because of a lack of legislation.
Another KMT legislator, Huang Chih-hsiung (黃志雄), also said it was legitimate that profits from sports lotteries should be used to support the sports industry.
But he warned that a special law for sports lotteries might change terms of the agreement stated in the contract with Fubon.
“The government needs to handle the issue with care,” he said.
Huang also said Taiwan’s baseball league should be included as a betting item as soon as possible, or sports fans would simply pay attention to overseas sports games and disregard domestic sports.
A hundred sports lottery outlets are scheduled to open tomorrow.
While fans will only be allowed to buy lottery tickets from outlets during the initial stage, the bank plans to eventually allow buyers to purchase them online.
Foreign tourists who purchase a seven-day Taiwan Pass are to get a second one free of charge as part of a government bid to boost tourism, the Tourism Administration said yesterday. A pair of Taiwan Passes is priced at NT$5,000 (US$156.44), an agency staff member said, adding that the passes can be used separately. The pass can be used in many of Taiwan’s major cities and to travel to several tourist resorts. It expires seven days after it is first used. The pass is a three-in-one package covering the high-speed rail system, mass rapid transport (MRT) services and the Taiwan Tourist Shuttle services,
Drinking a lot of water or milk would not help a person who has ingested terbufos, a toxic chemical that has been identified as the likely cause of three deaths, a health expert said yesterday. An 83-year-old woman surnamed Tseng (曾) and two others died this week after eating millet dumplings with snails that Tseng had made. Tseng died on Tuesday and others ate the leftovers when they went to her home to mourn her death that evening. Twelve people became ill after eating the dumplings following Tseng’s death. Their symptoms included vomiting and convulsions. Six were hospitalized, with two of them
DIVA-READY: The city’s deadline for the repairs is one day before pop star Jody Chiang is to perform at the Taipei Dome for the city’s Double Ten National Day celebrations The Taipei City Government has asked Farglory Group (遠雄集團) to repair serious water leaks in the Taipei Dome before Friday next week, Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) said yesterday, following complaints that many areas at the stadium were leaking during two baseball games over the weekend. The dome on Saturday and Sunday hosted two games in tribute to CTBC Brothers’ star Chou Szu-chi (周思齊) ahead of his retirement from the CPBL. The games each attracted about 40,000 people, filling the stadium to capacity. However, amid heavy rain, many people reported water leaking on some seats, at the entrance and exit areas, and the
BIG collection: The herbarium holds more than 560,000 specimens, from the Japanese colonial period to the present, including the Wulai azalea, which is now extinct in the wild The largest collection of plant specimens in Taiwan, the Taipei Botanical Garden’s herbarium, is celebrating its 100th anniversary with an exhibition that opened on Friday. The herbarium provides critical historical documents for botanists and is the first of its kind in Taiwan, Taiwan Forestry Research Institute director Tseng Yen-hsueh (曾彥學) said. It is housed in a two-story red brick building, which opened during 1924. At the time, it stored 30,000 plant specimens from almost 6,000 species, including Taiwanese plant samples collected by Tomitaro Makino, the “father of Japanese botany,” Tseng said. The herbarium collection has grown in the century since its