Two Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators voiced opposition yesterday to "pork barrel" bills proposed by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers that they said would only benefit military veterans and their dependents.
In a joint statement, DPP legislators Sandy Yen (莊和子) and Chai Trong-rong (蔡同榮) said KMT lawmakers have been pushing 11 "pork barrel" bills, including housing subsidies that favor military veterans and their families.
Saying that the majority of Taiwanese are not responsible for "feeding" a handful of Mainlander veterans who came to Taiwan more than four decades ago, Chuang and Chai urged all pan-green legislators and novice pan-blue lawmakers, to block the bills from being passed.
Chuang said the 11 bills would cost NT$1.8 trillion (US$55.73 billion) if they became law. He said there was no need for Taiwanese, who comprise more than four-fifths of the population, to pay for the daily needs of Mainlander veterans, who number less than one-tenth of the population.
The NT$1.8 trillion, Chuang said, could be spent on more pressing needs, such as national defense, education or social work.
Chai said that more than 10,000 veterans have retained their household registrations in Taiwan but live in China, while the number of veterans who return from China in January and July to pick up their regular government pensions is more than 50,000.
KMT lawmakers have proposed an amendment to an act governing the reconstruction of veterans and military dependents' houses that says some 350,000 veterans who do not live in military residential compounds should still be entitled to special housing subsidies. The amendment was approved in a first reading in the legislature on Jan. 8.
The amendment would require more than NT$1 trillion to subsidize the reconstruction of military residential compounds that have been built since the 1950s.
Chuang and Chai said the amendment was a pan-blue bid to curry favor with veterans ahead of next year's legislative and presidential elections.
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