A draft act to designate Armed Forces Day — commemorated on Sept. 3 — as a public holiday has been described by the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) as an attempt to match a similar Chinese policy, with the caucus vowing to block the draft.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lin Yu-fang (林郁方) submitted the draft, saying that he proposed renaming Armed Forces Day to “Memorial Day for the war dead and Armed Forces” and making it a public holiday — with work and classes canceled — to commemorate soldiers who died in battle.
The Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee last week passed a preliminary review of the draft, but dropped the name change, which KMT Legislator Chan Kai-chen (詹凱臣) described as “lengthy.”
To mark the signing of Japan’s surrender that ended World War II on Sept. 2, 1945, the then-KMT government announced a three-day holiday starting on Sept. 3, TSU Legislator Lai Cheng-chang (賴振昌) said.
The event was officially known as Victory Over Japan Day from 1946 until it was renamed Armed Forces Day in 1955, Lai added.
Lai questioned the motive of the draft, saying that the Chinese State Council last month announced a three-day public holiday to commemorate its Army Day — also on Sept. 3 — that marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War.
Lai said Taiwanese lawmakers are proposing a similar policy in order to pander to China.
“The TSU will pull the draft act out of inter-party negotiations if it is put on the legislative agenda,” Lai said.
Saying that not every holiday requires work and classes to be canceled, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus whip Tsai Chi-tsang (蔡其昌) raised concerns about the draft, saying that the nation must follow a holistic and systematic policy on public holidays.
Tsai said that canceling work and classes on Armed Forces Day might be construed as politically motivated to garner support from a particular group of voters for next year’s presidential and legislative elections.
The business sector also questioned the need to designate a military holiday as a public holiday, which would add to the already “too many” public holidays in the nation, KMT deputy caucus whip Liao Kuo-tung (廖國棟) said.
The KMT caucus has yet to discuss the draft, Liao said.
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
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
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