Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (
Ma is expected to unveil his second democratic reform policies today in Nantou County.
He has said he would create an evaluation committee in 2010 to look at constitutional reform and nominate a premier acceptable to the legislature, while limiting the president's authority to the fields of foreign policy, cross-strait affairs and national security.
"Taiwan must look ahead and walk toward a democratic future with vision. We need to further advance democracy ... and raise it to a higher level," Ma said yesterday while attending the 100th anniversary of the Taipei Water Park in Gongguan.
Following the lifting of martial law in 1987, a series of democratic reforms were launched, including an end to the ban on the formation of political parties and the elimination of the cap on the number of newspapers allowed to run.
Ma has proposed to abide by the Constitution and to respect the spirit of the dual executive system before pushing for constitutional reform when the time is ripe.
Ma has repeatedly urged the government to implement the Constitution and nominate a premier who is acceptable to the legislature.
During the KMT congress, he has also promised he would pick a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)-affiliated premier if his party won a majority in the legislature.
Meanwhile, Ma lashed out at the government yesterday for what he claimed constituted a decision that ignored the interests of the population by deciding to hold separate legislative and presidential elections next year.
"Holding separate elections within two months will come at a great cost ... Most people wanted to hold the elections together, but the DPP decided to follow the wishes of one individual," Ma said, declining to say who he was referring to.
The Central Election Commission decided on July 6 that the presidential election would be held on March 22 while the legislative election would be held on Jan. 12, turning down a KMT proposal that the two elections be combined.
"The DPP should not put the party's interests ahead of those of the people," he said.
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