President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) expressed hope on Thursday that the Legislative Yuan would quickly review and pass major bills crucial to economic and trade development during a second extra legislative session scheduled for July 28.
Ma issued the call at a tea reception at the Presidential Office for the heads of all five branches of the government — the executive, legislative, judicial, control and examination branches.
The routine reception attracted media attention this year, as it comes after the legislature went into recess without a vote on Ma’s list of 29 nominees to the Control Yuan.
In addition, it was the last such meeting before the current six-year terms of the control and examination branches are set to expire in late July and late August respectively.
During Thursday’s reception, Ma said that numerous bills were stalled by the three-week-long student-led occupation of the Legislative Yuan that started on March 18 and which led to the extra legislative session that was held between June 13 and Friday last week, that was intended for the review of Control Yuan nominees and interim regulations governing elderly farmers’ welfare allowances.
However, since what he described as “an opposition blockade” kept the legislature from voting on the nominations on Friday last week, the legislature decided to hold a second extra session, Ma said.
Ma said that if the Control Yuan continues to be left idle, it will constitute a violation of the Constitution.
Ma said he hopes the legislators will proceed quickly with major bills, including draft bills on proposed free economic pilot zones, legislation for overseeing cross-strait negotiations and the cross-strait trade-in-services agreement.
Claiming that public support for the service trade pact has surged since March, Ma said this shows that people understand that the bill is of great importance for the nation’s development.
Saying that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) agreed with South Korean President Park Geun-hye in Seoul last week to sign a bilateral free-trade agreement (FTA) by the end of the year, Ma said that the pact will have an immediate impact on Taiwan, just like a US-South Korea FTA that took effect two years ago, which has significantly affected Taiwan’s exports.
Ma said that 70 percent of Taiwan’s economic growth relies on foreign trade and that a considerably high portion of the nation’s exports overlap those of South Korea.
This nation cannot prevent the trade pacts South Korea signs with other countries from affecting exports, meaning that the only way for Taiwan to bolster its own trade is to sign economic cooperation and free-trade deals with its trade partners, according to the president.
The tea reception was first held in May 2009 and is held twice each year.
The last gathering was held in late November last year, but Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) did not attend, as he was attending his brother’s funeral.
That meeting occured during the height of a political squabble between Ma and Wang, as the president was trying to oust Wang as speaker over allegations of illegal influence peddling.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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