The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislative caucus supports scrapping the National Unification Guidelines, and the status quo across the Taiwan Strait would by no means be affected by such an abolishment, a DPP legislative party whip said yesterday.
Yeh Yi-jin (
Yeh made the remarks in response to news reports that Chen has instructed the National Security Council and Presidential Office Secretary-General Mark Chen (
PHOTO: LIU HSIN-DE, TAIPEI TIMES
The NUC, established by the former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government in the early 1990s, has been an unofficial agency under the Presidential Office.
The National Security Council and the president's aides are expected to come up with a plan before the end of this month to eliminate ad hoc commissions under the Presidential Office in line with a Legislative Yuan resolution.
It is hoped that the president will fully inform Washington before the National Security Council submits the plan to him for implementation, Yeh said.
News reports have said that Chen's proposal to consider dissolving the NUC and the National Unification Guidelines -- made in a speech that he gave on Lunar New Year's Day -- has irritated Washington.
In that speech, the president said Taiwan should seriously consider scrapping the NUC and National Unification Guidelines, seek to join the UN under the name "Taiwan" and draft a new constitution by the end of this year to pave the way for a referendum in 2007.
Washington has reiterated that the US does not support any unilateral changes to the status quo.
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