Advocates and dozens of civic groups yesterday condemned the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus for sending the cross-strait service trade agreement to a plenary session without it being screened, adding that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and the KMT “have declared war on Taiwan’s democracy.”
In a joint meeting of eight legislative committees to review the controversial pact, yesterday’s agenda was put forth by the KMT caucus, leading the Democratic Progressive Party to criticize the ruling party for “forcing” a final vote on the agreement — one the KMT would be sure to win.
“If that’s the case, Taiwanese have no choice but to declare war on Ma and lawmakers who know nothing but loyalty to Ma,” Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌), a research fellow at Academia Sinica, said yesterday evening.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
Earlier yesterday at a protest held in front of the Legislative Yuan in Taipei, the protesters gave Ma, Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) and the KMT caucus a 24-hour deadline to agree to six demands about the controversial trade pact.
They demanded that the agreement should neither be directly sent for a second reading nor take effect automatically, also that the legislature review the agreement clause by clause and list the withdrawal or suspension of the pact as alternative options.
“We could hardly believe that Ma and the KMT have done this on the first day [of a three-day review session]. We will immediately stage a sit-in here until Ma and the KMT make an appropriate response to our demands,” Lai Chung-chiang (賴中強), convener of the Democratic Front Against Cross-strait Trade in Services Agreement, told a press conference in front of the legislature yesterday evening.
The protesters called for a line-by-line review of the deal and adjustments to mitigate the possible damage to local businesses.
“With more than 70 percent of the people supporting a clause-by-clause review [of the pact], we think that a president with a 9 percent support rate has no right to unilaterally decide Taiwan’s future,” Lai said, adding that the KMT’s disregard of mainstream public opinion was a failure of Taiwan’s democracy.
“It is obvious to me that Ma has forced Taiwanese to search for an ‘outside-the-system’ solution, so that is what we’re going to do,” said Hsu Wei-chun (徐偉群), convener of Taiwan Democracy Watch.
Additional reporting by CNA
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