The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) said yesterday it was studying the possibility of drafting a decree on the role of the armed forces in disaster relief in the wake of Typhoon Morakot and submitting it as a priority bill to the legislature.
KMT Secretary-General Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) said that since President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) had expressed the hope that the military would include disaster prevention in its mandate, he has instructed the party’s Policy Committee and think tank to draw up a draft bill to regulate the armed forces’ participation in disaster relief and make such participation more effective.
KMT caucus whip Lin Yi-shih (林益世) said he believed the legislature would pass the bill if both the ruling and opposition parties reached a consensus.
During their weekly luncheon with Ma, Vice President Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) and KMT Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄) yesterday, Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) and Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) discussed the Executive Yuan’s draft post-Morakot reconstruction bill, which the legislature will begin reviewing in a special session this afternoon.
Presidential Office Spokesman Wang Yu-chi (王郁琦) said Wang and Liu had discussed the content of the bill and amount of the special budget needed for reconstruction.
The Executive Yuan has proposed to a budget of NT$100 billion (US$3.12 billion), while the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has suggested NT$200 billion.
Wang Yu-chi said the luncheon participants thought the eight-year, NT$80 billion water management project authorized by the former DPP government was effective in addressing the problems caused by rivers under the jurisdiction of local governments. However, the money for the rivers managed by the central government was not enough and needed to be boosted.
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