A plan by more than half the Taipei City Council to holiday in Hawaii triggered controversy yesterday as Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
Ma said the councilors' travel plan was reasonable as long as a budget for the trip was passed according to the legislative procedure.
"However, I hope that the city council could take the city's finances into consideration, as it is in straitened circumstances," Ma said.
The Taipei City Council has budgeted NT$4 million for a six-day trip to Hawaii next month to "promote fellowship."
Thirty-nine of the 52-member council have signed up for the trip, along with nearly 100 family members.
Council Secretary-General Lin Chia-chi (
Lin emphasized that this year's travel budget passed through legislative procedure.
"We are simply conducting this [yearly trip] according to the regulations," Lin Chia-chi said.
KMT City Councilor Lin I-hua (
"I have never taken part in any of the [yearly] trips by the city council," she said.
"I think the most controversial part of this year's trip is that the council appropriated money -- NT$1 million each -- from two other budgets, [one] for coun-cilors' education and [one for] physical activities," Lin I-hua said.
"Although the yearly trips are an activity that has worked for la ong time, it is high time to review whether it is proper to spend so much money for councilors' activities," Lin I-hua said. "I thought the [council's] travel expenses would be much lower after the SARS epidemic."
DPP City Councilor Wang Shih-chien (
"Mayor Ma did not express such an opinion when the budget was passed. His comment is a little late," Wang Shih-chien said.
"I think the budget for `survey' travel [visiting other countries to see how city councils work there] is necessary, but the one for vacation travel needs to be discussed further," he said.
Wang Shih-chien will not participate in the Hawaii trip.
PFP City Councilor Wang Yu-cheng (
"I will strive to boycott the [travel] budget in the next session," Wang Yu-cheng said.
"It is a super-luxury vacation paid for with the hard-earned money of taxpayers," he said.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: