President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday said that he hoped the most controversial parts of the cross-strait service trade agreement could be “renegotiated with China later,” allowing the pact to be passed by the Legislative Yuan first.
General Chamber of Commerce director-general Lai Cheng-i (賴正鎰) reported Ma’s comments at the Presidential Office yesterday morning in a meeting with the nonprofit organization’s board of directors and supervisors.
“Letting the agreement continue to stall in the legislature risks not only affecting our ties with China, but also creating a psychological barrier for other countries when they want to sign a treaty with us,” Ma was quoted as saying.
Ma said that a majority of the agreement’s service subsectors were supportive of the treaty, and therefore he hoped the agreement could be brought into force first, leaving the parts relating to skeptical subsectors up for renegotiation in accordance with Article 8 and Article 11 of the agreement, Lai said.
“In addition to strictly overseeing the follow-up negotiations, the government plans to allocate NT$98.2 billion (US$3.26 billion) in assistance and counseling services to the industries that would bear the brunt of the impacts,” Lai quoted Ma as saying.
Ma was cited as saying that the agreement would pave the way for Taiwan to participate in the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which were vital to boosting exports.
Turning to an earlier consensus reached by all-party lawmakers to carry out an item-by-item review of the treaty, Ma said that while the legislature was entitled to make amendments, doing so would almost certainly void the accord.
With regard to the “back-room deal” label attached to the treaty by its opponents, Ma was quoted as saying this was inappropriate, given that a total of 110 consultative meetings were held by the Ministry of Economic Affairs with industrial representatives before the pact was signed in June last year.
Twenty public hearings were organized by the legislature afterwards, he added.
Ma proposed a meeting with Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairperson-elect Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) to discuss economic policies, Lai said.
“Hopefully, we will be able to reach a consensus [on the handling of the agreement]. After all, the accord concerns each and every Taiwanese, not just the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT],” Lai cited Ma as saying.
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