A spending plan of NT$500 billion over the next five years presented by the premier yesterday received full backing from the Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) lawmakers, a DPP legislator said yesterday.
"The entire DPP caucus expressed unqualified support for the plan after hearing the briefing by Premier Yu Shyi-kun and his officials," said Chiu Chui-chen (邱垂貞).
Yu visited the legislature a few hours after he released the plan at the Neihu Science-based Industrial Park, where he discussed its contents with DPP lawmakers.
Chiu acknowledged that "some DPP legislators were surprised by the announcement because they had not been informed about the plan in advance."
"Members of the caucus made their decision to push through the passage of the spending plan after they came to a full understanding of it," he said.
But the response from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus was more guarded.
"The KMT is happy to see that the DPP has finally diverted its focus from political issues to reviving the economy four months before the presidential election," said KMT whip Lee Chia-chin (李嘉進).
Lee warned however that the legislature would not subject the proposed bill to further procedures because lawmakers were busy reviewing the budget for next year.
The bill would not be advanced at the legislature until next month, when lawmakers will have finished dealing with the budget, according to Lee.
He said the KMT was thinking of making the spending plan a referendum issue so that voters could make the final decision on the Cabinet's proposal.
"The KMT thinks that voters should be the ultimate arbiter on the spending plan as the projects presented by the DPP government today extend five years beyond Chen Shui-bian's (
The People First Party (PFP) declined to comment on the Cabinet's plan, instead presenting its own version. The PFP model said that Taiwan should be divided into four regions to further regional development.
Each region should have its own international airport and harbor, in addition to a separate water supply, according to PFP representatives.
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