President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday said he expected the new Cabinet, led by premier-designate Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺), to be fully prepared to face new challenges ahead of its official swearing-in on Feb. 18.
As the nation celebrates the Lunar New Year holiday, Ma said the new Cabinet should continue efforts to address major issues and to boost the economy.
“The [Lunar] New Year holiday is not a period for the new Cabinet to relax. We’ve seen signs of an economic recovery, and it is important that we take the occasion to boost the economy further,” he said.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
He dismissed concerns about a lack of experts on finance and economics in the new Cabinet and said former premier Sean Chen (陳冲) had helped stabilize the economy after the global financial tsunami and laid a solid foundation for the new Cabinet to ensure continued growth this year.
As an annual family tradition, Ma accompanied his 93-year-old mother, Chin Hou-hsiu (秦厚修), to the market one day before Lunar New Year’s Eve. They spent NT$3,720 on buying pork, chicken, fruit, vegetables, dumplings, cooked food and flowers at Xinglong Market, near his mother’s residence in Wenshan District (文山), Taipei.
Holding his mother’s hand, Ma offered New Year greetings and handed out red envelopes to vendors and shoppers at the market.
Ma said he did not think prices had increased much compared with last year, while his mother shrugged off growing public discontent with the president.
“Criticisms will help him improve,” she said.
Ma said he cherished the quality time with his mother before the holiday starts, and added that the home-cooked Lunar New Year’s Eve dishes would give him energy to work for the nation in the coming year.
The president later visited Eden Social Welfare Foundation’s training center for people with disabilities in Wenshan to make a donation ahead of the holiday.
While spending time with members at the center, Ma called on the public to contribute to a fund for specially designed public minibuses that help transport people with disabilities, saying it was a practical way of helping people.
The “Fu-Kang Buses” cost about NT$1 million each. Increasing the number of such buses as part of an effort to create a friendlier environment for the disabled was a major policy touted by Ma when he served as Taipei mayor.
There are 260 Fu-Kang buses in Taipei, 270 in New Taipei City (新北市) and 217 in Greater Taichung. Ma said the nation has enough ambulances, and encouraged people who want to make donations to spend their money on Fu-Kang buses.
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