The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) will not be abolished from the Executive Yuan's organizational sphere, and pan-blue legislators should not use that as justification to drastically slash the council's budget for next year, MAC Vice Chairman David Huang (黃偉峰) said yesterday.
Huang said that the government has agreed to reinstate the MAC, which was dissolved in the government-sponsored draft amendments to the Organizational Act of the Executive Yuan (
Under the government's draft proposal to trim the Executive Yuan's organization, it will establish an office under the direct instruction of the Executive Yuan to take over the MAC, now a department under the Executive Yuan.
Pan-blue legislators had held up the change of the council's status as a reason to slash its budget, and put forward four demands regarding expanding cross-strait exchanges -- including the implementation of direct cross-strait transport links and Lunar New Year charter flights; direct flight services between Hong Kong, Macau and Taipei's Sunghsan Airport, and the opening of Taiwan to Chinese tourists.
"To dissolve the establishment of the MAC is just one of the proposals to revise the organization of the Executive Yuan, which is not a finalized policy," Huang said.
The MAC was established in 1990 to handle relations between Taiwan and China in the wake of frequent contacts between the two countries' private sectors starting in 1987, the year when Taiwan first opened indirect trade with China.
The draft amendment has been awaiting review in the Legislature, while the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) said in its caucus' draft that the MAC should be incorporated into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
As changing the council's establishment might provoke quarrels on the unification and/or independence issue, the government will not insist on its initial position to dissolve the MAC, a high-ranking MAC official said earlier this week on condition of anonymity.
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