President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) approval rating has risen to more than 40 percent this month, the second-highest since he assumed the presidency in May 2008, according to the results of a survey conducted by a local magazine that were announced on Thursday.
The poll, conducted by Global View magazine, shows that Ma’s approval rating was 40.3 percent, up 5.7 percentage points from the previous month, second only to the 40.7 percent recorded in June 2009.
In contrast, the disapproval rating for Ma was 47.6 percent. a drop of 7.1 percentage points from the previous month.
Analyzing the trend of the past year, the magazine said the president’s approval rating has shown an overall rise.
About 47.2 percent of the people surveyed also said they have faith in Ma’s performance, up 3.6 percentage points from the previous month, which compared with a lack of faith rating of 36.2 percent.
The gap in faith regarding Ma’s performance has widened to 11 percentage points, but whether such a trend will continue remains to be seen, the magazine said.
It said that both Ma’s approval rating and the public’s faith in him have risen because the economy has continued to recover.
In addition, reports of generous year-end bonuses in the private sector have also given rise to optimism that the country is firmly on the road to economic recovery.
Meanwhile, although the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) enjoys an absolute majority in the legislature, the approval rating of the overall performance of KMT lawmakers was 25.5 percent this month, up 0.9 percentage points from the previous month.
This compared with a disapproval rating of 55.3 percent, down 2.7 percentage points.
The overall approval rating for KMT legislators has fallen within the 20 percent to 30 percent range over the past 30 months, according to the poll results.
“This indicates that even though the legislature has approved such major bills as health insurance premium reform, the public’s perception of the overall performance of the KMT legislators has not notably improved,” an official at the magazine’s survey research center said.
The poll was conducted on Sunday and Monday and collected 1,012 effective samples, with a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
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