Independent Legislator Li Ao (
With the meeting between President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and Soong looming, Li said yesterday that Soong's change of heart on the arms procurement project is bound to lead to divisions between Soong and his friends, including himself.
"When the Democratic Action Alliance (DAA,
"If he changes his mind simply because he wants to meet with Chen or for whatever political reason, I'll get very angry," Li said.
As an opposition party, Li said that the PFP's mission is to criticize and oppose the government.
"It doesn't make sense to reconcile with the government, because it's the opposition parties' job to question and oppose the government," he said.
"It's not the opposition parties's job to wipe the govern-ment's ass when it screws up," Li said.
Commenting on Li's remarks, DPP Legislator Lee Wen-chung (
He also called on Soong to jointly push for partisan reconciliation with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and not to be threatened by "extremists' preposterous remarks."
"Those who distribute groundless accusations are worse than politicians who place their personal gain above the public interest," he said.
In addition to thanking Li for his advice, PFP legislative whip Liu Wen-hsiung (
"I'd like to guarantee, on my own life, that we are opposed to the NT$610.8 billion arms budget and will continue to oppose it in the future, even after the Chen-Soong meeting," he said.
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