The Presidential Office yesterday criticized the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) for creating obstacles to the proposed debate between President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and DPP Chairman Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) on the cross-strait service trade agreement, while reiterating its support for the debate.
The event was to be co-hosted by the Public Television Service Foundation, four major Chinese-language newspapers and the Central News Agency. However, the DPP insisted that the foundation should be the sole administrator and that media outlets should not be permitted to pose questions during the debate.
Presidential Office Deputy Secretary-General Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強) yesterday said that Ma has expressed his willingness to participate, adding that the DPP should be more cooperative regarding the arrangements of the debate.
“DPP Chairman Su should stop creating thresholds and obstacles to the debate. We need to meet the public’s expectation that the event take place as planned,” Lo said.
Talk of holding a debate on the agreement resurfaced after a survey released by the Chinese-language China Times last week showed that 63 percent of respondents supported the proposal to have Su and Ma discuss the pact.
The Presidential Office and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), which has been desperate to raise support for the trade deal, immediately responded positively to the proposal, saying that Ma was willing to accept an invitation to attend the debate and elaborate on the details of the pact to address the public’s concerns.
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