The Central Daily News, the nation's oldest newspaper, announced yesterday that due to financial losses it would close its doors today after 78 years in business.
In its final issue, the newspaper said its 70 staff would stay on for one or two months while the company looks for a buyer.
"We are closing temporarily and hope to re-open soon. Please wait," the paper said in an announcement on its front page.
The newspaper is owned by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
The KMT, once one of the world's richest political parties with assets estimated at US$6.5 billion in the 1990s, has already sold its gleaming 12-story headquarters in central Taipei and will move into a modest building this month to try to shake off its corrupt image.
The party is no longer willing to absorb the Central Daily News' snowballing losses, which totaled NT$800 million (US$25 million) as of April, and has so far failed to find a buyer for the newspaper.
The KMT has been in the decline since President Chen Shui-bian (
But an insider trading scandal implicating Chen's son-in-law has been a godsend for the KMT, which has also sold its television and radio stations and a film company in recent years to fund elections.
"[The party] can survive only if it is pragmatic ... My heart is heavy and I hate to part with it," KMT Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (
The Central Daily News was launched in Shanghai in 1928 as the mouthpiece of the KMT, and moved to Taiwan in 1949 after the KMT lost the Chinese civil war to the Communists.
Police have detained a Taoyuan couple suspected of over the past two months colluding with human trafficking rings and employment scammers in Southeast Asia to send nearly 100 Taiwanese jobseekers to Cambodia. At a media briefing in Taipei yesterday, the Criminal Investigation Bureau presented items seized from the couple, including alleged victims’ passports, forged COVID-19 vaccination records, mobile phones, bank documents, checks and cash. The man, surnamed Tsai (蔡), and his girlfriend, surnamed Tsan (詹), were taken into custody last month, after police at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport stopped four jobseekers from boarding a flight to Phnom Penh, said Dustin Lee (李泱輯),
BILINGUAL PLAN: The 17 educators were recruited under a program that seeks to empower Taiwanese, the envoy to the Philippines said The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in the Philippines on Thursday hosted a send-off event for the first group of English-language teachers from the country who were recruited for a Ministry of Education-initiated program to advance bilingual education in Taiwan. The 14 teachers and three teaching assistants are part of the Taiwan Foreign English Teacher Program, which aims to help find English-language instructors for Taiwan’s public elementary and junior-high schools, the office said. Seventy-seven teachers and 11 teaching assistants from the Philippines have been hired to teach in Taiwan in the coming school year, office data showed. Among the first group is 57-year-old
TRICKED INTO MOVING: Local governments in China do not offer any help, and Taiwanese there must compete with Chinese in an unfamiliar setting, a researcher said Beijing’s incentives for Taiwanese businesspeople to invest in China are only intended to lure them across the Taiwan Strait, after which they receive no real support, an expert said on Sunday. Over the past few years, Beijing has been offering a number of incentives that “benefit Taiwanese in name, while benefiting China in reality,” a cross-strait affairs expert said on condition of anonymity. Strategies such as the “31 incentives” are intended to lure Taiwanese talent, capital and technology to help address China’s economic issues while also furthering its “united front” efforts, they said. Local governments in China do not offer much practical
‘ORDINARY PEOPLE’: A man watching Taiwanese military drills said that there would be nothing anyone could do if the situation escalates in the Taiwan Strait Many people in Taiwan look upon China’s military exercises over the past week with calm resignation, doubting that war is imminent and if anything, feeling pride in their nation’s determination to defend itself. After a visit to Taiwan last week by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, China has sent ships and aircraft across an unofficial buffer between Taiwan and China’s coast and missiles over Taipei and into waters surrounding the nation since Thursday last week. However, Rosa Chang, proudly watching her son take part in Taiwanese military exercises that included dozens of howitzers firing shells into the Taiwan Strait off
RSS