Lawmakers yesterday finalized negotiations on planned pension reforms for retired military officers and non-commissioned officers, and resolved to send 15 amendments on which no consensus was reached to a vote today.
The disputed amendments center on whether the 18 percent preferential interest rate for some savings accounts of retirees should be phased out, the starting income replacement rate, the eligibility for family members of deceased officers and non-coms to receive benefits and the conditions for splitting pensions in the case of a divorce.
The caucuses agreed to advance those amendments on which consensus had been reached to a second reading at a plenary session.
Photo: Chang Chia-ming, Taipei Times
To offset a shortfall in the pension fund for military retirees as a result of the government downsizing the military, the four caucuses agreed to assign the Veterans Affairs Council to budget NT$100 billion (US$3.31 billion) in 10 years from the amendments’ promulgation.
The caucuses agreed the council is to budget no less than NT$20 billion every two years over the course of that period.
Legislative Speaker Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) said that he granted a request by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus to assign 20 legislators to speak on the disputed amendments before they are voted on today.
Photo: CNA
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the New Power Party and the People First Party caucuses would each appoint two members to speak, Su said.
The negotiations had a rather “cordial” undercurrent, Su said, who said he hoped that each caucus would take some time to consider whether further consensus could be reached before going into today’s plenary session.
DPP caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) said that the DPP had anticipated that proposals regarding the starting income replacement rate, the 18 percent preferential interest rate and the portion of salaries to be allocated monthly for the pension fund would have to be put to vote.
He called on the KMT caucus not to filibuster, and refrain from quarrelling over the less controversial amendments scheduled to be voted on today to “set a good example” and change the legislature’s culture.
Asked why members of the KMT caucus did not sign the resolutions reached during the negotiations, KMT caucus secretary-general Lee Yen-hsiu (李彥秀) said the caucus’ stance is not to endorse “the DPP’s pension reform.”
However, it retracted some of its motions regarding less contentious draft articles during the negotiations, and would respect the resolutions going into today’s vote, Lee 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
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