Premier Yu Shyi-kun said yesterday the Executive Yuan hopes to purchase arms as cheaply as possible, but he stressed that "there are no cheap options for national defense."
The premier made the remarks while fielding questions in the Legislative Yuan one day after Academia Sinica President Lee Yuan-tseh (李遠哲) claimed that a Cabinet-proposed NT$610.8 billion (US$18.23 billion) special budget for arms procurements from the US is too expensive and that the two sides of the Taiwan Strait should hold talks to avoid military conflict and work toward cross-strait peace.
"Taiwan's strategy focuses on war prevention and we will not take the initiative to attack or provoke China," Yu said.
Taiwan will not launch an offensive strike, nor will it change the status quo, Yu said, adding that "the preservation of the status quo is in the best interests of the 23 million people of Taiwan."
He said that arms procurement will depend on the country's needs and on the threats from enemies.
From the stance of the Executive Yuan and the Ministry of National Defense, the cheaper the price tag the better, although there are no cheap options for national defense.
Also, he went on, the budget for the major arms procurement package will be cheaper if Taiwan does not insist on building some of the eight submarines it wants. He was referring to the Cabinet's plan for the purchase of six batteries of the anti-missile PAC-III system, eight diesel-electric submarines and a squadron of 12 P-3C anti-submarine aircraft from the US.
Legislators also asked if Taiwan will announce "no independence" or if it will ask Lee to send messages to China, to which the premier replied that although he admires Lee for his concern about cross-strait peace and national security, it is President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) who is in charge of cross-strait policy.
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