Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators yesterday said the central government should request additional funding for outlying islands because a national fund ensuring their development had sunk dangerously low.
Twenty-two KMT legislators, including Chen Fu-hai (陳福海) and Tsao Erh-chang (曹爾忠), proposed that the government request a minimum budget of NT$3 billion (US$100,000) per year for the Offshore Islands Development Fund (離島建設基金) to facilitate construction on the nation’s outlying islands and ensure the sustainability of the fund.
The fund was established in 2001 with the stipulation that its financial resources should remain at NT$30 billion.
Under Article 16 of the Offshore Islands Development Act (離島建設條例), the government must help the fund ensure that this level is maintained by requesting annual budgets for a period of 10 years if necessary.
The government reached the goal by earmarking about NT$3.2 billion every year between 2001 and last year, and NT$1.2 billion this year.
However, about NT$3 billion was spent annually between 2001 and 2005, and about NT$1.2 billion per year between 2006 and this year, to subsidize construction projects on the islands.
The legislators said they were concerned about the financial status of the fund, as less than NT$10 billion remained after the expenditures from the past decade.
Tsao told the Executive Yuan’s Offshore Islands Development Committee last month that the fund could be completely consumed in four years if the government failed to appropriate new budgets for the fund.
Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) has previously promised to seek the budget request. He said that construction projects on the outlying islands would not be affected by the budget concerns.
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