The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus urged opposition legislators yesterday to release the budgets for the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) and the National Security Council (NSC), warning that their operations will grind to a halt by late next month.
At a press conference at the Legislative Yuan, DPP caucus whip Chen Chin-jun (
He expressed the worry that if the budget freeze is not cancelled, the MAC and the NSC will not be able to pay their utility bills in the next couple of months, let alone staff salaries.
Chen urged the opposition legislators not to block the motion for the ninth time when it is reintroduced in the procedure committee today.
In January, the opposition-controlled legislature slashed the MAC's budget for this year by 21 percent, a total of NT$96 million (US$3 million), and froze one half of the approved part of its budget in an apparent move to show their dissatisfaction with the MAC's performance last year.
KMT and PFP legislators passed a resolution requiring council officials to appear at the legislature's Home and Nations Committee and Budget and Final Accounts Committee to defend the MAC's China policy.
The MAC has been at odds with the KMT and the PFP on how to handle relations with China.
Last December, the council refused to allow Chen Yunlin (陳雲林), director of the Taiwan Affairs Office under China's State Council, to visit Taiwan to attend a cross-strait economic and cultural forum sponsored by the KMT.
More recently, the MAC further angered the opposition by calling China's gesture of offering a pair of pandas to Taiwan "a united front tactic."
The NSC also suffered a budget cut of NT$8 million, with two-thirds of its NT$200 million budget frozen.
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