Since eyewitness and media reports surfaced that members of the Falun Gong movement were being killed for their organs at the Sujiatun organ-harvesting death camp in China's Liaoning Province, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has sure felt the pressure. After two weeks of silence, its rhetoric -- a set of loose regulations on organ harvesting and denials of the existence of a Falun Gong death camp -- is less than convincing.
According to two witnesses, the victims are cremated alive immediately after the organs have been harvested, and out of the initial 6,000 Falun Gong members detained at the Sujiatun death camp, only 2,000 remain.
It is clear to me that the CCP has been working overtime to hide the evidence of the death camp and is ready to give a show-tour of the facilities.
A few questions spring to mind: What will happen to those 2000 Falun Gong members -- are they still alive? It is an open secret that Beijing wants to eliminate the Falun Gong movement before the 2008 Olympics.
I wonder how many more death camps there will be to achieve this goal. Who will be next? I hope our Canadian Members of Parliament will have the guts to officially condemn these crimes against humanity and launch a full-scale investigation.
This genocide must be stopped.
Marie Beaulieu Balmoral
Victoria, British Columbia,Canada
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sits down with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday next week, Xi is unlikely to demand a dramatic public betrayal of Taiwan. He does not need to. Beijing’s preferred victory is smaller, quieter and in some ways far more dangerous: a subtle shift in American wording that appears technical, but carries major strategic meaning. The ask is simple: replace the longstanding US formulation that Washington “does not support Taiwan independence” with a harder one — that Washington “opposes” Taiwan independence. One word changes; a deterrence structure built over decades begins to shift.
The cancelation this week of President William Lai’s (賴清德) state visit to Eswatini, after the Seychelles, Madagascar and Mauritius revoked overflight permits under Chinese pressure, is one more measure of Taiwan’s shrinking executive diplomatic space. Another channel that deserves attention keeps growing while the first contracts. For several years now, Taipei has been one of Europe’s busiest legislative destinations. Where presidents and foreign ministers cannot land, parliamentarians do — and they do it in rising numbers. The Italian parliament opened the year with its largest bipartisan delegation to Taiwan to date: six Italian deputies and one senator, drawn from six
Recently, Taipei’s streets have been plagued by the bizarre sight of rats running rampant and the city government’s countermeasures have devolved into an anti-intellectual farce. The Taipei Parks and Street Lights Office has attempted to eradicate rats by filling their burrows with polyurethane foam, seeming to believe that rats could not simply dig another path out. Meanwhile, as the nation’s capital slowly deteriorates into a rat hive, the Taipei Department of Environmental Protection has proudly pointed to the increase in the number of poisoned rats reported in February and March as a sign of success. When confronted with public concerns over young
Taipei is facing a severe rat infestation, and the city government is reportedly considering large-scale use of rodenticides as its primary control measure. However, this move could trigger an ecological disaster, including mass deaths of birds of prey. In the past, black kites, relatives of eagles, took more than three decades to return to the skies above the Taipei Basin. Taiwan’s black kite population was nearly wiped out by the combined effects of habitat destruction, pesticides and rodenticides. By 1992, fewer than 200 black kites remained on the island. Fortunately, thanks to more than 30 years of collective effort to preserve their remaining
RSS