The Cabinet will undergo a minor personnel change either just before or just after the Lunar New Year holiday that begins on Feb. 2, according to Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義).
Wu made the comment in response to questions on who would succeed Department of Health Minister Yaung Chih-liang (楊志良), who tendered his resignation on Tuesday, soon after controversial legislation to reform the national health insurance system passed the legislature.
Wu said Yaung had agreed to stay until Jan. 31 and if Yaung could not be persuaded to stay by then, the government would need to have somebody ready to fill the vacancy.
Asked whether Yaung had recommended someone to take his place, Wu said Yaung had not, but instead offered an analysis of the situation. As for who the replacement might be, Wu said it was still being discussed.
Yaung said he offered his resignation to take the blame for failing to ease the premier’s concern about how the national health insurance program calculates and collects premiums.
Yaung’s office proposed to change the income on which premiums are assessed from the current calculations based on an individual’s salary to total household income, but the formula was rejected by lawmakers, who believed it would be too difficult to implement and create inequities.
After Yaung backed away from the household income formula, the new plan that was adopted set the premium rate at 4.91 percent of an individuals’ regular monthly salary, as opposed to the existing 5.17 percent rate.
However, under the new plan, other forms of income that were previously unaccounted for, such as dividends, interest and professional income, will also be taxed at a rate of 2 percent to generate more revenues.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: