With the current legislative session due to end on Friday next week, lawmakers yesterday decided that a two-week extra session will be held from June 13 to discuss several highly disputed issues.
Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) presided over a cross-party negotiation that agreed an informal meeting will be held on June 13 to launch the extra session, which will run through June 27.
Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) will be invited to present a report during the extra session on the plan to extend compulsory education from nine to 12 years and take questions from lawmakers at a question-and-answer plenary session.
The 12-year compulsory education program covering secondary and vocational schools is scheduled to start in August next year, but concerns have been raised about the changes.
The People First Party (PFP) was behind the push for Jiang to appear before the legislature to explain the program.
The policy was “paved with good intentions,” but the government has not yet come up with complementary measures to address issues of concern, PFP caucus whip Thomas Lee (李桐豪) said.
For example, rules governing admission to secondary schools should be based upon open and fair assessment and should be able to avoid discriminating against economically disadvantaged students, which would otherwise widen the gap between social classes, Lee said.
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus wants to push through the proposed referendum on the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s (新北市) Gongliao District (貢寮), an amendment to the yet-to-be-implemented capital gains tax on stock transactions and reforms to the nation’s pension systems.
KMT whip Lai Shyh-bao (賴士葆) said the party might call for another session in July if no progress was made in the June session.
If the referendum proposal passes the legislature next month, a referendum on the question: “Do you agree that the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant should be halted and that it not become operational?” (你是否同意核四廠停止興建不得運轉) must be held no later than the end of this year.
The KMT-proposed amendment to the Income Tax Act (所得稅法) aims to revise the controversial capital gains tax on securities transactions, which was introduced just a year ago.
The proposal, which cleared the legislature’s Finance Committee on Monday, suggested the removal of the requirement that the TAIEX surpasses 8,500 points for the tax to be imposed on all investors and replace it with a tax that would be imposed on investors who sell NT$1 billion (US$33.3 million) in shares within one calendar year.
For next month’s session, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus will focus on bills to decommission all nuclear power plants by 2025, legislation to prevent media monopolies and amendments concerning a fair budget allocation among local governments, caucus whip Pan Men-an (潘孟安) 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