Approval ratings for three Cabinet officials in charge of economic affairs failed to reach double digits and more than 40 percent of respondents said they should be removed from office, a public opinion poll showed yesterday.
Minister of Economic Affairs Shih Yen-hsiang (施顏祥) received an approval rate of just 9 percent, but that was still higher than Minister of Finance Chang Sheng-ford’s (張盛和) 7.9 percent and Council for Economic Planning and Development Minister Yiing Chii-ming’s (尹啟銘) 6 percent, according to a survey conducted by the Taiwan Indicators Research Survey.
The three officials’ disapproval ratings ranged between 29 percent and 37.7 percent, with respondents who said that they were unaware of anything the officials had done exceeding 44 percent for all three.
Among those who polled, 41.5 percent said the officials should be replaced, while 38.9 percent said they should keep their jobs.
Asked who deserved to be replaced the most, 34.4 percent of respondents chose Shih, with Yiin at 22.7 percent and Chang at 14.3 percent.
Eleven percent of respondents said all three should be removed.
On a scale of 1 to 100, respondents gave President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and his administration a year-end score of 46.6 points.
A further breakdown saw Ma averaging 38.3 points among pan-green supporters, 42.9 points among independent voters and 58.6 points among pan-blue supporters.
The survey was conducted between Thursday and Friday and collected 1,017 valid samples with a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
Liya Chu (朱如茵), whose parents are New York-based Taiwanese restaurateurs, has been crowned the champion of US television cooking competition MasterChef Junior, after wowing the judges, including celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, with a feast of fusion cuisine. In the finale of the show’s eighth season, broadcast on Thursday, Chu walked away with US$100,000 after serving a spread of spiced duck breast with scallion pancakes and miso eggplant, followed by coconut pandan panna cotta with a passion fruit coulis and sesame tuille. Chu, who was 10 years old at the time of filming three years ago, faced off against then-11-year-old Grayson Price from
A university student has gained the spotlight for an interactive map he designed detailing all of China’s military bases and installations throughout the Indo-Pacific region. Soochow University music student Joseph Wen (溫約瑟), who calls himself an amateur military enthusiast, said he created the map to “help people better understand the cross-strait situation.” Wen originally posted the map online on June 14 last year, but it gained greater attention after he mentioned it during an appearance on a China Television talk show. On the show, Wen said he had gathered information on the locations from publicly available Web sites, as
RISK FACTORS: ‘We hope people can cooperate and endure it ... it is possibly the very important last mile,’ Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung said Taiwan’s COVID-19 restrictions and mask regulations are to remain the same next month, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday. The center reported 42,112 new local COVID-19 cases and 85 deaths, saying that the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients has dropped to a new low this month. Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the CECC, said that the center is keeping COVID-19 restrictions and mask regulations the same due to the local virus situation, and an increase in the number of imported cases of the new Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 of SARS-CoV-2, among other risk factors. Easing
GLOBAL STRATEGY: Indo-Pacific alliances need reinforcement to prevent Chinese occupation of Taiwan, which would threaten Japan, Hawaii and Australia, Pompeo said The US should officially recognize Taiwan as a free, independent nation and establish official diplomatic ties, former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo told an event at the Hudson Institute in Washington on Friday. Every US president since Harry Truman has considered Taiwan’s existence to be of utmost importance to US national security, Pompeo said. Taiwan is a principal US partner in technology and economic matters, and if China were to capture Taiwan’s semiconductor supply chain, it would severely hamper the US economy, Pompeo said. Should China occupy Taiwan, it would severely weaken US influence in the Indo-Pacific region and its surrounding areas,
RSS