The Executive Yuan should come up with a bill on regulating the signing of agreements between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) said on Friday.
Noting that cross-strait affairs are crucial to the nation’s survival and sustainable development, Wang said no single party or individual could solely decide on the course of development of cross-strait relations.
While cross-strait relations have been developing very quickly since the inauguration of the new Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government, Wang said the country had yet to develop a sufficient supervisory mechanism to oversee the developments.
Recalling that the previous KMT administration had twice referred bills governing the signing of cross-strait agreements to the legislature for screening, Wang, a KMT heavyweight, said he wondered why the party had not yet come up with such a proposal now that it has regained power. In his view, Wang said, cross-strait affairs should be kept as transparent as possible.
“Otherwise, disputes or controversies could arise after a bilateral accord is reached,” he said.
It is also very important that opposition parties be allowed to have a say in the process of negotiations, Wang said.
“By so doing, hindrances could be minimized in striking a cross-strait deal,” he said.
Parliamentary supervision of major policy issues is the norm in mature democratic countries, Wang said, and the lawmaking body should not be excluded from the crafting and implementation of cross-strait policies because they are critical to security, sovereignty and popular rights and interests.
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
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
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