The Cabinet yesterday approved a draft statute on streamlining the Cabinet, cutting the number of agencies under it from 36 to 26.
Premier Chang Chun-hsiung (
Although a number of Cabinet members had questioned the need for instituting a ministry to deal with veterans' affairs, Cabinet spokesman Shieh Jhy-wey (謝志偉) told a news conference after the meeting that Taiwan's move toward a volunteer military service would still necessitate the creation of a ministry to care for veterans.
Chang said that the draft bill, along with amendments to the Organic Standard Law of Central Government Agencies (
With the new legislative session scheduled to start on Friday, the Cabinet will seek to actively cooperate with the legislature to speed up the restructuring of the executive branch of the government, the premier said.
Under the draft bill, six new ministries would be established under the Executive Yuan to add to the eight ministries mandated by the Organic Law of the Executive Yuan.
The 14 ministries would cover interior and homeland security, foreign and overseas affairs, defense, finance, education and sports, justice, economic affairs, transportation and construction, labor and human resources, agriculture, public health and social welfare, environmental resources, tourism and culture, and veterans' affairs.
The seven commissions would cover a new technology commission, a new maritime council, a new commission on gender equality, a new national development commission, the Hakka Council, the Council of Indigenous Peoples and the Mainland Affairs Council.
The five independent institutions are the Central Bank of China, the Central Election Commission, the Fair Trade Commission, the Financial Supervisory Commission and the National Communication Commission.
The restructured Executive Yuan will also add two deputy secretary generals, one of which will help the secretary general with administrative affairs and the other to act as the body's spokesman.
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