The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) polling center yesterday said that more than 60 percent of Taiwanese think there has been a lack of transparency during talks between China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) and Straits Exchange Foundation Chairman Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤), despite President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) call for transparency in cross-strait talks.
More than half of the respondents in the poll said cross-strait agreements on certification and standardization of merchandise would have a negative impact on Taiwan.
Nearly 70 percent supported DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) call to Ma to promise that Taiwan would sign free trade agreements (FTAs) with other countries after signing an economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) with China.
Dividing respondents into supporters of the pan-green and pan-blue camps, results indicated that 81.3 percent of pan-green-camp supporters agreed with Tsai’s call, while 65.9 percent of pan-blue supporters also agreed.
“This shows that no matter what their political stance is, everyone thinks Ma should promise that Taiwan would be able to sign FTAs with other countries after signing an ECFA with China,” the DPP statement said.
Also, 71.1 percent of respondents said China was the biggest obstacle to Taiwan’s attempt to sign FTAs with other countries.
The poll was conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday and collected 914 valid samples.
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