The Executive Yuan has scheduled more than 100 public hearings to solicit views on how to address problems plaguing the nation’s various pension systems before it, in conjunction with the Examination Yuan, comes up with reform proposals in January, Vice Premier Jiang Yi-hua (江宜樺) said yesterday.
Jiang, who leads a task force on the issue, said the Cabinet has also set up an ad hoc office staffed by five officials from the Council for Economic Planning and Development, the Ministry of National Defense, the Council of Labor Affairs, the Ministry of Education and the Directorate-General of Personnel Administration.
Next month, the Executive Yuan would adopt a bottom-up and community-level approach to consult public opinions from different sectors of society to serve as a reference in formulating reform proposals, he said.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) last Wednesday demanded that proposals to reform the nation’s various pension programs for labor, civil servants, military personnel, farmers and the National Pension Insurance Fund, which covers citizens who are not covered by other social insurance funds, be put forward in January.
“On the issue of pension reform, we cannot work behind closed doors. We have to first understand how people in different occupations think about the issue. We do not have any pre-established stance and are open to all ideas,” he said.
Jiang said the Executive Yuan has received positive responses from the caucuses of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the Taiwan Solidarity Union, the People First Party and independent lawmakers to its request that Cabinet officials sit down with them to discuss the issue.
Ma called a meeting attended by Premier Sean Chen (陳冲), Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) and Examination Yuan President John Kuan (關中) to set a timetable for the reform a week ago after he rejected a proposal by the DPP that a national affairs conference be held to deal with the issue.
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:
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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