As part of its election campaign, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) yesterday established a "tractor team" which will tour agricultural centers around the country with the promise of improving farmers' lives and building up the agriculture industry.
The "Taiwan Tractor Team," whose members include former Council of Agriculture chairman Lin Hsiang-neng (林享能) and Jan Che (詹澈), a pro-KMT member of the Taiwan Farmers' Alliance, is set to hit the campaign trail today with a mission to explore the issues which concern farmers most.
Jan, the team leader, introduced a white paper on six policies to "save Taiwanese farmers." These include exporting agricultural products to China, striving for decent retirement pensions for farmers, and conducting land reforms to help farmers adapt to WTO rules.
"The [former] KMT government carried out policies such as deducting rent on farms [from taxation] and giving land back to the farmers. Those policies protected farmers from being exploited by landlords," Jan said.
"Now farmers' incomes are shrinking, and the government pensions are insufficient to improve farmers' lives," Jan added.
In addition to the tractor team, the party also unveiled a print-media advertising campaign titled "From Ilha Formosa to Jeju Island," which features allegations of corruption in the Democratic Progressive Party government.
Offering an indirect boost to the KMT campaign, People First Party (PFP) members in the Taipei city council called on their party to persuade PFP candidates struggling with poor approval ratings to drop out of the race.
"The year-end elections are crucial for the pan-blue camp, and we should not lose any seats which we have a significant chance of winning," PFP Councilor Dai Hsi-chin (
Left-Handed Girl (左撇子女孩), a film by Taiwanese director Tsou Shih-ching (鄒時擎) and cowritten by Oscar-winning director Sean Baker, won the Gan Foundation Award for Distribution at the Cannes Critics’ Week on Wednesday. The award, which includes a 20,000 euro (US$22,656) prize, is intended to support the French release of a first or second feature film by a new director. According to Critics’ Week, the prize would go to the film’s French distributor, Le Pacte. "A melodrama full of twists and turns, Left-Handed Girl retraces the daily life of a single mother and her two daughters in Taipei, combining the irresistible charm of
A Philippine official has denied allegations of mistreatment of crew members during Philippine authorities’ boarding of a Taiwanese fishing vessel on Monday. Philippine Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) spokesman Nazario Briguera on Friday said that BFAR law enforcement officers “observed the proper boarding protocols” when they boarded the Taiwanese vessel Sheng Yu Feng (昇漁豐號) and towed it to Basco Port in the Philippines. Briguera’s comments came a day after the Taiwanese captain of the Sheng Yu Feng, Chen Tsung-tun (陳宗頓), held a news conference in Pingtung County and accused the Philippine authorities of mistreatment during the boarding of
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is pushing for residents of Kinmen and Lienchiang counties to acquire Chinese ID cards in a bid to “blur national identities,” a source said. The efforts are part of China’s promotion of a “Kinmen-Xiamen twin-city living sphere, including a cross-strait integration pilot zone in China’s Fujian Province,” the source said. “The CCP is already treating residents of these outlying islands as Chinese citizens. It has also intensified its ‘united front’ efforts and infiltration of those islands,” the source said. “There is increasing evidence of espionage in Kinmen, particularly of Taiwanese military personnel being recruited by the
88.2 PERCENT INCREASE: The variants driving the current outbreak are not causing more severe symptoms, but are ‘more contagious’ than previous variants, an expert said Number of COVID-19 cases in the nation is surging, with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) describing the ongoing wave of infections as “rapid and intense,” and projecting that the outbreak would continue through the end of July. A total of 19,097 outpatient and emergency visits related to COVID-19 were reported from May 11 to Saturday last week, an 88.2 percent increase from the previous week’s 10,149 visits, CDC data showed. The nearly 90 percent surge in case numbers also marks the sixth consecutive weekly increase, although the total remains below the 23,778 recorded during the same period last year,
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