The disputed arms procurement bill is not likely to be passed by the opposition-controlled Legislative Yuan in the near term, according to political observers.
Analysts said they see no signs that the bill will clear the legislature any time soon, although the pan-blue camp of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the People First Party (PFP) maintains only a slight majority over the "pan-green camp" of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU).
At the legislature's final budget screening session on Thursday, the pan-blue alliance engineered a vote to axe all of the funds in the Ministry of National Defense's (MND) 2006 budget plan related to the long-stalled US arms procurement package. The Sixth Legislative Yuan's second legislative session ended on Friday, and the next session will open next month.
With its slim majority in the legislature's Procedure Committee, the pan-blue camp has blocked the arms package from being put onto the legislative agenda for full-house deliberation more than 40 times since mid-2004.
Political analysts predicted that disputes centering on the arms procurement bill will continue into the next legislative secession despite the fact that the MND has substantially trimmed the planned budget for the purchase of eight diesel-electric submarines, three Patriot PAC-III anti-missile batteries and 12 P-3C anti submarine airplanes from the US.
The MND has also agreed to have only the submarines financed by a special budget bill, while incorporating the funds needed for the two other items into its regular annual budget.
Given the protracted and hostile standoff between the pan-blue and pan-green camps, political observers said that the fate of the arms procurement bill will remain uncertain when the next legislative session opens next month.
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