President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday pledged his determination to implement pension and fiscal reforms amid opposition from the pan-blue camp, and said the government would present solutions next month to make the pension mechanism sustainable.
Faced with the opposition of several Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers to the Cabinet’s proposal to narrow the coverage of year-end pension benefits for public sector retirees, Ma met yesterday with Premier Sean Chen (陳冲), Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平), Control Yuan President Wang Chien-shien, Examination Yuan President John Kuan (關中) and Judicial Yuan President Rai Hau-min (賴浩敏) in the Presidential Office to seek solutions and form a consensus on the issue.
Ma promised that the government would come up with a more reasonable and fair pension system that would ease the nation’s financial burden.
Government statistics show that without reform, the nation’s four major pension funds will go bankrupt within two decades, with the military personnel pension program in danger of becoming insolvent in 2017, the public school teachers’ pension fund in 2027, the Public Service Pension Fund in 2028 and the Labor Insurance Fund in 2031.
Chen proposed the pension reform in October to reduce the number of recipients of a year-end bonus given to more than 445,000 retired military personnel, civil servants, public school teachers and employees of state-owned enterprises.
Under the proposal, the money should only be given to retirees or the families of deceased retirees who receive a monthly pension of less than NT$20,000 and families of retirees who were killed, injured or disabled in wars or military exercises.
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