Taiwan’s new legislature is on Monday to swear in lawmakers with a lower average age, while a record number of female lawmakers are to be appointed, statistics released yesterday by the Central Election Commission (CEC) showed.
The legislature is to have 43 female lawmakers, five more than the present legislature, while the average age of the legislators is to drop from 52 to 50, the CEC’s figures showed.
The number of newly elected male lawmakers in the new legislature would fall to 70 from 75, the statistics showed.
While the number of newly elected lawmakers aged between 30 and 39 rose to 11 from 8, and the number of legislators aged between 40 and 44 increased to 24 from 16, the number of newcomers aged 60 or above fell to 18 from 25, the commission said.
The legislature is set to contain one lawmaker aged below 29, while the previous parliament had no legislators that young, the figures showed.
The new legislature has 54 members who challenged incumbents and won, up five from four years ago.
The number of newly elected lawmakers who hold a doctorate is to fall from 27 to 20, while the number of lawmakers-elect who hold a master’s degree will rise to 58 from 55, the statistics showed.
The legislature is to be the first time that the KMT would be the minority party, and it is likely be the first time that the legislative speaker and deputy speaker are served by non-KMT lawmakers, the figures showed.
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it is fully aware of the situation following reports that the son of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai (薄熙來) has arrived in Taiwan and is to marry a Taiwanese. Local media reported that Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), son of the former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is to marry the granddaughter of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital founder Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政). The pair met when studying abroad and arranged to get married this year, with the wedding breakfast to be held at The One holiday resort in Hsinchu
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
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