More than 100 legislators, lawyers, doctors, human rights activists and non-governmental organization heads from Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Macau yesterday established an Asian branch of the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong in China.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator William Lai (賴清德), who is also the president of the branch, faxed a letter during the press conference in Taipei to the offices of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) and Luo Gan (羅幹), the member of the Politburo Standing Committee who oversees police and judicial matters for the Chinese Communist Party.
Urgent need
The letter demanded that the Chinese government allow the group to conduct field investigations into allegations of government persecution against Falun Gong members in China.
"There is a very urgent need to investigate the situation in China as persecution is happening every day," Lai said.
The group said that the Chinese government executed 1,616 prisoners annually between 2000 and last year, but that it also completed 1,000 organ transplants annually during the same period.
"Establishing this branch means we are going to take action to defend justice and human rights on an international scope," Lai said.
Selling organs
A report by independent Canadian investigators David Kilgour, formerly director of the Asia-Pacific Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, and human rights attorney David Matas says that the Chinese government has profited from selling organs taken from living Falun Gong practitioners.
The group did not say what it would do in the event that the Chinese government did not allow it to proceed with a probe.
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
US climber Alex Honnold is to attempt to scale Taipei 101 without a rope and harness in a live Netflix special on Jan. 24, the streaming platform announced on Wednesday. Accounting for the time difference, the two-hour broadcast of Honnold’s climb, called Skyscraper Live, is to air on Jan. 23 in the US, Netflix said in a statement. Honnold, 40, was the first person ever to free solo climb the 900m El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park — a feat that was recorded and later made into the 2018 documentary film Free Solo. Netflix previewed Skyscraper Live in October, after videos
Starting on Jan. 1, YouBike riders must have insurance to use the service, and a six-month trial of NT$5 coupons under certain conditions would be implemented to balance bike shortages, a joint statement from transportation departments across Taipei, New Taipei City and Taoyuan announced yesterday. The rental bike system operator said that coupons would be offered to riders to rent bikes from full stations, for riders who take out an electric-assisted bike from a full station, and for riders who return a bike to an empty station. All riders with YouBike accounts are automatically eligible for the program, and each membership account
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS