Remarks by Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) that at least five Cabinet ministers could be replaced in the coming days failed to satisfy the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which yesterday said the changes failed to reach the “actual people that need to be replaced.”
“In fact, the Cabinet member who should be most urgently replaced is Wu himself,” DPP spokesperson Lin Yu-chang (林右昌) said. “Under his Cabinet, the income gap has grown, prices of everyday items have gone up and the misery index hasn’t stopped rising.”
Lin added that the DPP felt other ministers should also be facing the chopping block, including Environmental Protection Agency Minister Stephen Shen (沈世宏) for a series of environmental controversies and Minister of the Interior Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) for the -increasing the national debt
Minister of Finance Lee Sush-der (李述德) should also step down to take responsibility for the lowered credit rating the nation received from Fitch Ratings on Wednesday, Lin added. Fitch, citing high public debt and lagging fiscal growth, reduced the country’s rating to “AA-” from “AA.”
“These ministers are President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) favorites, but they need to all be replaced,” Lin said.
On Thursday evening, while dining with senior media executives, Wu was quoted as saying that at least five ministers would be replaced in an upcoming Cabinet reshuffle.
Sources said the new Cabinet lineup would be finalized in the next few days and announced before the Lunar New Year holiday, which begins on Wednesday.
The newly appointed ministers would formally take over their new posts on Feb. 8.
Informed sources said the reshuffle would mainly focus on recruiting new faces, including some who are now working abroad, to serve as ministers without portfolio.
Three incumbent Cabinet members — National Youth Commission Minister Wang Yu-ting (王昱婷), Department of Health Minister Yaung Chih-liang (楊志良) and Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Minister Kao Su-po (高思博) — will definitely be replaced because they have tendered their resignations.
Despite calls for the government to reshuffle its economic and financial team in preparation for tougher challenges ahead in the global commodity and financial markets, incumbent economics and finance ministers would remain in their posts, as both Ma and Wu are satisfied with their efforts to revitalize the domestic economy during the past year, the sources said.
Ma is scheduled to visit Taiwan’s allies in Africa in March and preparatory work will begin after the Lunar New Year holiday.
“It is not likely that Minister of Foreign Affairs Timothy Yang (楊進添) will step down at this moment,” an official familiar with the issue said.
The restructuring of the Cabinet lineup will give priority to meeting the challenges of the next round of legislative elections and next year’s presidential election, the sources said.
Taipei Medical University president Chiu Wen-ta (邱文達) has been tapped to succeed Yaung as the new health minister, with Mainland Affairs Council Minister Lai Shin-yuan (賴幸媛) possibly concurrently serving as minister of the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission after the reshuffle.
It remains unclear whether a female replacement would be named to succeed Wang as the new youth affairs minister.
If the post were filled by a man, the ratio of female ministers would drop even further below the one-quarter level promised by Ma during his presidential campaign.
Women currently account for 23 percent of the Cabinet lineup.
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