Citing a poll conducted by a government agency, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) on Tuesday said that the majority of Taiwanese oppose lowering the voting age and support the economic liberalization espoused by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), as well as the passage of the controversial cross-strait service trade agreement in the upcoming extraordinary legislative session.
At a KMT meeting on Tuesday, Ma, who doubles as party chairman, reportedly ordered the party caucus to quickly pass the service trade pact, citing a recent poll conducted by the National Development Council that found that 47 percent of respondents called for a review of the pact “as soon as possible.”
According to the council’s survey, 41 percent of respondents support the service trade pact, while 28 percent oppose it, and 47 percent agree that the pact should be reviewed as soon as possible, while 29 percent want the legislature to retract it.
The council said 68 percent of those surveyed support the institutionalization of a cross-strait agreement oversight mechanism, while less than 10 percent oppose the idea.
The president also said a proposal to amend the Constitution to lower the voting age runs against mainstream opinion because the survey shows that at least 55 percent of respondents oppose lowering the voting age.
The council said only 34 percent of respondents to the poll support a constitutional amendment to lower the voting age from 20 to 18.
While the president reportedly criticized the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), asking the party not to misinterpret public opinion, DPP lawmakers were not alone in calling for a lower voting age.
KMT Legislator Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) proposed the amendment last month along with two DPP legislators, saying that the idea has garnered wide cross-party support.
The council said the poll collected 1,088 valid samples on May 23 and May 24 and had a margin of error of 2.97 percentage points.
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