A freeze on the annual budget of the nation's Aboriginal Television Channel imposed in January by the opposition-controlled legislature was lifted yesterday.
The end of the freeze came after Walis Pelin (瓦歷斯.貝林), minister of the Council of Indigenous Peoples, warned several days ago that the channel would fold by the end of May if the freeze were not lifted soon.
Also, independent aboriginal Legislator May Chin (
Chin also queried the appropriateness of giving Aboriginal TV's annual budget to the private Eastern Multimedia Group, which in turn produces all programs aired by Aboriginal TV.
Chin demanded that the Council of Indigenous Peoples come up with a plan to help secure Aboriginal TV's independence. Otherwise, she said, the channel should be disbanded and its annual budget used to hire another station to produce better programs.
Meanwhile, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Chen Hsiu-hui (
Chen said there had been too much influence-peddling by legislators seeking to pressure the station into employing associates.
The freeze on two other budget items concerning the Council of Indigenous Peoples -- the budget for the building and maintenance of 37 Aboriginal museums islandwide and the budget for the development of modern Aboriginal communities -- were also lifted during the session of the Legislative Yuan Home and Nations Committee yesterday.
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:
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