Taking a hard line, the People First Party (PFP) said yesterday that it will boycott a controversial arms budget unless President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) apologizes for accusing Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) of meeting with a Chinese official in the US.
"Soong never met with Taiwan Affairs Office director Chen Yunlin (
"Unless Chen publicly apologizes or explains himself, the PFP will boycott the arms budget and will not negotiate," Hsieh said.
In a TV interview earlier this month, Chen said that he had received information that Soong and Chen Yunlin had met in the US.
The president also said that the Chinese official had pressured the US to get Soong and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (
While the president has not said where his information came from, the National Security Bureau has said it didn't give Chen the data.
"The bureau has said that it hadn't heard of such a meeting. A nation's leader should not speak so irresponsibly. Chen [Shui-bian] should explain himself," Hsieh said.
When asked about the difference this makes in the PFP's position on the arms purchase budget, legislative caucus whip Chen Chih-pin (陳志彬) told the Taipei Times yesterday that the PFP is already against the budget.
The PFP has long said that it would not approve the arms budget unless changes were made either in the items to be bought or the budget's status as a special budget.
The PFP has been against the NT$480 billion (US$15.25 billion) US arms procurement bill since it was introduced last year, even though the Cabinet reduced the budget from its original NT$610.8 billion request.
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:
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
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