The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) yesterday delivered more than 1.45 million signatures for three referendum proposals it has launched, saying the support it received was proof of public grievance against the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration.
A proposal to promulgate air pollution regulations received 496,444 signatures, while a proposal calling for a halt to the construction of a coal power plant in New Taipei City’s Rueifang District (瑞芳) was backed by 482,507 signatures, KMT Vice Chairman Tseng Yung-chuan (曾永權) told a news conference in Taipei.
A proposed referendum to maintain a ban on food products from five Japanese prefectures that was imposed after the 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear disaster obtained 478,015 signatures, Tseng said.
Photo: CNA
All three garnered signatures far surpassing the threshold of 281,745 — 1.5 percent of the eligible voters in the most recent presidential election — for a referendum proposal to pass the second-stage threshold and be put to voters, he said.
“All three proposals concern matters of people’s livelihoods and transcend the traditional blue-green political divide,” said KMT Vice Chairman Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌), who initiated the proposal to maintain the import ban.
It was the DPP administration’s disregard of public health that forced people to resort to referendums to protect themselves, Hau said, adding that there were also DPP supporters who backed his signature drive.
Photo: CNA
KMT caucus whip Johnny Chiang (江啟臣), who is also director of the party’s Central Policy Committee, said the strong support received by the three drives underscored the public’s desire to live a better and healthier life.
The KMT hired four trucks to deliver the signatures to the Central Election Commission and sent staff members to watch over the signatures as the commission processed and calculated them.
According to the Referendum Act (公民投票法), the commission is required to finish examining the signatures within 30 days of receiving them and announce the establishment of the referendum within 10 days of determining that it has met the second-stage threshold.
The result of a referendum will be declared legitimate if 25 percent of eligible voters cast ballots and a majority votes in favor of it.
The Central Election Commission has said that proposals received by Friday have the best chance of being on ballots in the nine-in-one local elections on Nov. 24.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching