The first legislative floor meeting after the nine-in-one elections yesterday ended only minutes after it started and with Deputy Legislative Speaker Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) announcing that various bills, including legislation on an oversight mechanism for cross-strait agreements, would be referred to further cross-party negotiations.
The legislature was closed for a week before the elections before reopening on Monday, but several standing committees were not able to hold scheduled meetings due to the absence of Executive Yuan officials resulting from the Cabinet’s resignation following the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) disastrous defeat in the elections.
Yesterday’s legislative floor meeting was also affected. The scheduled agenda for the floor session, including the readings of the amendment to the Income Tax Act (所得稅法) and the draft bill on long-term care service, was delayed for the bills to be negotiated among the parties. Also referred to cross-party negotiations was the reconsideration of the cross-strait agreements oversight mechanism bill, which — if dealt with according to the agenda — would have to be put to a vote and referred to the Internal Administration Committee for deliberation.
Despite the deferral, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus still placed the oversight bill, along with the approval of the proposed Control Yuan members, on the agenda for the floor meeting on Friday in the Procedure Committee meeting.
KMT caucus whip Alex Fai (費鴻泰) said that since the two proposals were fairly near the bottom of the agenda, there would be little chance that they would be discussed at the next meeting.
Economic Democracy Union convener Lai Chung-chiang (賴中強) and member Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) visited the Democratic Progressive Party and Taiwan Solidarity Union party caucuses on Monday, calling on the two parties to require the new Cabinet to retract the version of the draft bill proposed by Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺).
The group told the two parties that the Executive Yuan’s version of the bill should be redrafted by the new Cabinet and that the bill should be reviewed only after the KMT finished its legislator nominations next year, when the legislators are no longer restricted by party discipline.
Lai yesterday reiterated that the outcome of the election showed that President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) approach to cross-strait relationship-building was opposed by the public.
Voters are asking the government to prioritize Taiwan’s economic and political autonomy in any future cross-strait economic and trade negotiations to reduce the nation’s dependence on China, Lai said, adding that it was urgent to break the “comprador system of the cross-strait clique of the wealthy and powerful.”
Lai said that since a new mandate has formed, the passage of the problem-ridden cross-strait service trade agreement and trade in goods agreement should be postponed until a new president and a new legislature are elected in 2016.
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