President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) should call off the second-phase electricity price hike planned for December because he has failed to submit plans to reform state-run oil refiner CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC) or Taiwan Power Co, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said yesterday.
“Ma pledged in April to submit reform plans on the two state-run companies within three months. However, we have not heard from him [on this issue] after four months,” DPP spokesperson Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) told a press conference.
Good news about Taiwan’s economy in recent months has been rare, Lin said, with the forecast for GDP growth this year scaled down to 1.66 percent, the eighth time it has been revised downward this year, while the consumer price index (CPI) and export numbers are also worrying.
Ma was forced to make the pledge to review management efficiency at the firms, their purchase deals and personnel because of the unpopularity of his decision to allow price increases for electricity and fuel, Lin said, adding that the higher prices have led to much hardship. The poor economic statistics have showed that the Ma administration was clueless about the recession, Lin said.
The nation’s miserable economic performance was contrary to comments by Vice President Wu Den-yih (吳敦義), who is visiting Central American allies, and who said that “Taiwan’s economy is fine and outperforming [that of] other countries.”
Lin said that Wu cited incorrect data when he said in Central America that Taiwan’s exports to China and the export volumes to China of items on the early-harvest list under the Economic -Cooperation Framework Agreement continued to grow — evidence that the cross-strait trade pact benefited Taiwan.
Taiwan’s exports to China between January and May were down 6.1 percent and exports to China of items on the early-harvest list decreased by 5.7 percent between January and May, Lin said.
“Is he lying or simply clueless? I don’t know,” Lin said.
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