A plan by the legislature to negotiate a disputed draft act on innovative industries failed to pass yesterday after the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus skipped the meeting.
Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) called off a scheduled cross-party negotiation session shortly after the meeting began yesterday morning.
The cancellation came after DPP caucus whip Chai Trong-rong (蔡同榮) showed up, but did not stay to negotiate the Cabinet’s proposal on promoting innovative industries (產業創新條例) with his Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Non-Partisan Solidarity Union (NPSU) counterparts.
Legislators reached a consensus at the end of the last legislative session to prioritize the proposal in the current session, but did not agree to put the bill to a third reading.
The Executive Yuan removed a controversial article from the proposal that would allow multinational corporations establishing corporate headquarters in Taiwan and meeting certain requirements to be taxed a flat business income tax of 15 percent — 5 percent lower than the recently adopted rate for businesses.
As the article would have applied to some Fortune 500 companies, including local firms Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, Acer Inc, Asustek Computer and Quanta Computer, the DPP and tax reform activists criticized it as overly benefiting large corporations.
KMT caucus secretary-general Lin Hung-chih (林鴻池) told reporters after the session that the caucus supported the proposal and questioned why the DPP failed to attend the session.
DPP caucus secretary-general Chen Ying (陳瑩) said members of the caucus had prior engagements, adding that the party was not trying to boycott the negotiation.
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