The group of student protesters who have been staging a "hunger strike" in front of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial said early yesterday morning that they ended their strike as planned but would continue protesting.
Rejecting President Chen Shui-bian's (
"We made the time and conditions under which we wished to meet President Chen clear from the very beginning of our protest. For him to suddenly say that he has no time and suggest an alternate date indicates a lack of integrity and sincerity," said Chen Cheng-feng (
The protesters originally demanded that Chen meet them before yesterday. In response, Chen suggested a two-hour-long meeting in public tomorrow.
"We are ending the hunger strike because we need to consider the physical well-being of our members," Chen Cheng-feng said.
"The next step of our movement focuses on interacting with the people and encouraging them to join our sit-down protest. We are going to bring in more student protesters, and communicate with the public about our demands," he said.
The group's 20-odd members have been encamped at the memorial since April 2 and had been taking turns fasting for 12 hours at a time.
The group did not participate in the rally held yesterday by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and People First Party (PFP), saying that they had no political affiliations and thus no reason to join in. They expressed anger that the pro-blue camp had used images of them in newspaper ads for yesterday's rally and demanded that the PFP-KMT alliance apologize.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
The eastern extension of the Taipei MRT Red Line could begin operations as early as late June, the Taipei Department of Rapid Transit Systems said yesterday. Taipei Rapid Transit Corp said it is considering offering one month of free rides on the new section to mark its opening. Construction progress on the 1.4km extension, which is to run from the current terminal Xiangshan Station to a new eastern terminal, Guangci/Fengtian Temple Station, was 90.6 percent complete by the end of last month, the department said in a report to the Taipei City Council's Transportation Committee. While construction began in October 2016 with an
NON-RED SUPPLY: Boosting the nation’s drone industry is becoming increasingly urgent as China’s UAV dominance could become an issue in a crisis, an analyst said Taiwan’s drone exports to Europe grew 41.7-fold from 2024 to last year, with demand from Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression the most likely driver of growth, a study showed. The Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology (DSET) in a statement on Wednesday said it found that many of Taiwan’s uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) sales were from Poland and the Czech Republic. These countries likely transferred the drones to Ukraine to aid it in its fight against the Russian invasion that started in 2022, it said. Despite the gains, Taiwan is not the dominant drone exporter to these markets, ranking second and fourth
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
RSS