Activist groups such as Truth of Taiwan Presidential Election Alliance (TTPEA) that run advertisements attacking Pres-ident Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) in Washington have close ties to the pan-blue camp, with some members also having close ties to China, a Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) legislative candidate said yesterday.
David Huang (黃適卓), son of TSU chairman Huang Chu-wen (黃主文), alleged yesterday that several groups, including the TTPEA and the Alliance for Truth in Taiwan Presidential Election (ATTPE), had been running advertisements in US media to slander Chen and discredit the presidential election.
"One advertisement even compared Chen to Adolf Hitler, and this is an insult to Taiwan. The groups also ignored the choice made by Taiwanese voters," Huang said.
Huang said that the Hitler advertisement was similar to one made by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-People First Party (PFP) alliance during the presidential election campaign. Huang then said that these groups running advertisements in Washington had close ties with the pan-blue camp.
"For example, since March 20 the head of the ATTPE, Chen Chuang-fei (陳壯飛), has worked with Dai Qi (戴錡) and Li Jingfen (李競芬), two members of the China-backed Strait Peaceful Re-unification Association, in spending big bucks on running the advertisement `Going to War over Taiwan's Illegitimate President,'" Huang said.
"Though ATTPE changed its name later on, the association's spokesman, Stan Tsai (蔡德樑), was a convenor for the New Party in Washington and has repeatedly promoted reunification," he said.
Huang also showed a news report dated Aug. 5 from China's Xinhua Net (
"These groups have claimed that they are non-partisan, yet their advertisements have become a part of China's reunification propaganda. The pan-blue camp should explain its connections to these groups," Huang said.
The New Party was not happy to hear the accusations.
"The Democratic Progressive Party used to do the same thing in the US too!" Yok Mu-ming (
The two groups have been the subject of controversy since an e-mail campaign targeted members of the US Congress and advertisements in the Congressional newspaper Roll Call were placed.
The e-mail -- titled "US Gov-ernment Backing `Taiwan Hitler' for a War?" -- was sent to members of Congress earlier this month and can be viewed on the Internet (www.2bullets.com/index.htm).
Mugshots of Chen and Hitler are placed alongside one another in the e-mail, which also says that Taiwan will provoke a cross-strait conflict and labels Chen a warmonger who relies on US support.
The e-mail also asked the US not to side with Chen because "Chen is an illegitimate president who stole a fraudulent election."
The Web site provides a link to a pan-blue supporters' club in Seattle (panblue.org).
The half-page Roll Call ad was sponsored by the TTPEA and the "Chinese-American Alliance for Democracy in Taiwan."
Titled "In Taiwan, Dead People Can Vote!" the ad claims Chen won re-election through trickery.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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