The Cabinet said yesterday that President Chen Shui-bian's (
Pan-blue supporters have been venting their frustration out on the streets of Taipei since the Lien-Soong ticket lost the election on March 20.
A claimed 468,000 pan-blue supporters took to the streets two days ago, demanding a meeting between the leaders of the two camps, an immediate and complete recount of the ballots and an investigation into the assassination attempt and the initiation of the emergency security measures.
With the crowds in front of the Presidential Office dispersed, Chen said he would go along with the blue camp's proposals and promised to cooperate with the judiciary on the recount.
Cabinet spokesman Lin Chia-lung (
"They have clamored to hold a massive rally to counter the pan-blue rally. But it is not a good thing for the pan-blue supporters and the pan-green supporters to provoke each other, so President Chen's talk last evening was also intended to calm pan-green supporters," he said.
"President Chen Shui-bian chose to hold a press conference after the March 27 rally had finished because by then the Central Election Commission had officially declared his re-election, and the US had issued an official statement to congratulate him on his re-election," Lin said. "Plus it was difficult to predict the result of the pan-blue rally, so the president had to wait till the rally finished to give his talk."
Lin said that he thought the timing of Chen's speech was appropriate because many foreign reporters were still in the country to observe the pan-blue rally, so it was necessary for Chen to explain what was going on and what was on his mind.
"If the president chose to speak before the rally, it might have resulted in pan-blue supporters making more unreasonable demands. So the president finally decided to respond to their demands after the rally finished," Lin said.
"The President has the duty to keep the capital secure. While he responded to the pan-blue supporters' appeals, he also adopted a firm stand to evict the few people who remained on Ketagalan Boulevard after the rally finished so that most people's daily lives wouldn't be affected," Lin said.
Meanwhile, the Cabinet declared that it would cooperate with the Judicial Yuan on the recount.
Lin said the election controversy is gradually being solved as the Judicial Yuan will be able to hold the recount soon.
"The amendment to the Presidential and Vice Presidential Election and Recall Law (
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS