A special election has been scheduled for Jan. 9 to decide whether to recall independent Legislator Freddy Lim (林昶佐), the Central Election Commission announced yesterday.
The date was set after the commission reviewed a petition to recall the lawmaker initiated by Cheng Ta-ping (鄭大平), who collected 38,286 signatures, 27,362 of which have been verified.
To force a recall vote, the campaigners were required to obtain at least 24,475 signatures, or 10 percent of the eligible voters in Lim’s fifth electoral district in Taipei covering Wanhua (萬華) and part of Zhongzheng District (中正).
Photo: Tu Chien-jung, Taipei Times
The push for a recall came following a domestic COVID-19 outbreak that began in May, with Wanhua being one of the epicenters.
Lim was accused of siding with the central government rather than standing up for his constituents when a government official seemingly tried to absolve the central health authorities of responsibility for the outbreak by saying it originated in Wanhua.
Lim was also criticized when he appeared at a media event in early June with central government officials after an outbreak occurred at Huannan Market, with some people saying that he only visited the market at election time.
Lim said that he was confident he would hold his seat in the legislature, and his focus is on revitalizing Wanhua and Zhongzheng, where Taipei first began to develop.
In addition to holding talks with residents in his constituency ahead of the recall vote, he said he would continue to campaign against the four referendum initiatives to be decided on Dec. 18.
Under the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法), Lim would be recalled if at least 25 percent of eligible voters in his district vote in favor, and they outnumber those who vote against it.
The CEC said it would announce the number of eligible voters for the recall election by Jan. 5, after it compiles a list later this month.
Lim, 45, was re-elected with 81,853 votes last year to a second legislative term as an independent, after taking the seat for the opposition New Power Party with 82,650 votes in 2016. His margins of victory ranged between 3 and 4 percent.
Before becoming a politician, he gained international fame as the lead vocalist of the heavy metal band Chthonic, and was known as a campaigner for Taiwanese independence.
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