A Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmaker yesterday proposed that the number of Examination Yuan members be cut by half to reduce government costs and facilitate clean politics.
DPP Legislator Wong Chin-chu (翁金珠) said the positions of Examination Yuan members had become a type of reward offered by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to party loyalists, with 12 of the 19 nominees for the positions affiliated with the KMT.
With the Legislative Yuan already having been downsized from 225 to 113 seats, it is unreasonable to maintain the current size of the government branch overseeing the civil service, Wong said.
As the Constitution does not stipulate how many members should be appointed to the Examination Yuan, KMT legislators can address the issue immediately by helping to screen out half of the candidates nominated by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), the lawmaker said.
The Legislative Yuan yesterday began reviewing the Examination Yuan nominations and will vote on them on Friday. The KMT, which controls more than 70 percent of the seats in the legislature, plays a decisive role in the process.
KMT Legislator Lo Shu-lei (羅淑蕾) said the party’s lawmakers were in a difficult position, because if all the Control Yuan nominations were approved, it would have given the public the impression that the legislature was simply a rubber stamp.
However, after the legislature voted down unqualified candidates, KMT legislators were criticized as defiant, Lo 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