President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday said she will call a policy coordination meeting every week starting tomorrow in the hope of making her administration’s policymaking more efficient and comprehensive.
Through the mechanism, her administration will set the direction and tempo of important policies, and discuss how to divide up the work, said Tsai, who serves concurrently as chairperson of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Besides Tsai, the meetings will be attended by Vice President Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁), Premier Lin Chuan (林全) and Vice Premier Lin Hsi-yao (林錫耀), Presidential Office spokesman Alex Huang (黃重諺) said.
Other participants are to include DPP caucus convener Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘), DPP caucus secretary-general Wu Ping-jui (吳秉叡), DPP Secretary-General Hung Yao-fu (洪耀福), the DPP’s New Frontier Foundation think tank chief executive officer Chiou I-jen (邱義仁) and representatives of local governments controlled by the DPP.
Huang said the meeting will serve the purpose of holding regular discussions of major policies between the Presidential Office, the Cabinet and the DPP, in a bid to improve the policymaking process and improve its quality, speed and efficiency.
The implementation of a five-day workweek is expected to be one of the main topics at tomorrow’s meeting.
Tsai’s announcement comes amid various opinions polls showing that her approval rating has fallen below 50 percent.
A survey released on Monday last week by the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation found that 44.7 percent of Taiwanese approved of Tsai’s handling of major national issues, compared with 52.3 percent in August and 69.9 percent when she first took office.
EUROPEAN TARGETS: The planned Munich center would support TSMC’s European customers to design high-performance, energy-efficient chips, an executive said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday said that it plans to launch a new research-and-development (R&D) center in Munich, Germany, next quarter to assist customers with chip design. TSMC Europe president Paul de Bot made the announcement during a technology symposium in Amsterdam on Tuesday, the chipmaker said. The new Munich center would be the firm’s first chip designing center in Europe, it said. The chipmaker has set up a major R&D center at its base of operations in Hsinchu and plans to create a new one in the US to provide services for major US customers,
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday said that it would redesign the written portion of the driver’s license exam to make it more rigorous. “We hope that the exam can assess drivers’ understanding of traffic rules, particularly those who take the driver’s license test for the first time. In the past, drivers only needed to cram a book of test questions to pass the written exam,” Minister of Transportation and Communications Chen Shih-kai (陳世凱) told a news conference at the Taoyuan Motor Vehicle Office. “In the future, they would not be able to pass the test unless they study traffic regulations
‘A SURVIVAL QUESTION’: US officials have been urging the opposition KMT and TPP not to block defense spending, especially the special defense budget, an official said The US plans to ramp up weapons sales to Taiwan to a level exceeding US President Donald Trump’s first term as part of an effort to deter China as it intensifies military pressure on the nation, two US officials said on condition of anonymity. If US arms sales do accelerate, it could ease worries about the extent of Trump’s commitment to Taiwan. It would also add new friction to the tense US-China relationship. The officials said they expect US approvals for weapons sales to Taiwan over the next four years to surpass those in Trump’s first term, with one of them saying
‘COMING MENACINGLY’: The CDC advised wearing a mask when visiting hospitals or long-term care centers, on public transportation and in crowded indoor venues Hospital visits for COVID-19 last week increased by 113 percent to 41,402, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday, as it encouraged people to wear a mask in three public settings to prevent infection. CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said weekly hospital visits for COVID-19 have been increasing for seven consecutive weeks, and 102 severe COVID-19 cases and 19 deaths were confirmed last week, both the highest weekly numbers this year. CDC physician Lee Tsung-han (李宗翰) said the youngest person hospitalized due to the disease this year was reported last week, a one-month-old baby, who does not
RSS