China said yesterday that Tai-wanese reporters covering the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics would be able to operate under relaxed reporting rules similar to ones announced earlier for foreign media, theoretically giving them greater freedom to travel and report.
Li Weiyi (
Taiwanese journalists will also be able to hire local Chinese to assist them in their reporting, Li said at a regular news conference in Beijing.
The new regulations abolish rules requiring Taiwanese reporters obtaining government approval for all travel and interviews.
Like regulations already issued for foreign journalists reporting on the Olympics, the rules for Taiwanese journalists will be in force from Jan. 1 to Oct. 17, 2008.
At the same news conference, Li slammed President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) for his "pro-independence stance."
Responding to a question on recent comments by Chen that exchanges across the Taiwan Strait had increased since he was first elected, Li said Chen's ``stubborn adherence'' to independence for Taiwan since he was first elected six years ago has hampered relations.
"Chen Shui-bian's stubborn adherence to Taiwan independence for the last six years has consistently provoked confrontation between the mainland and Taiwan," Li said.
The Mainland Affairs Council yesterday said Beijing's claim was a "deliberate scheme aimed at misleading the public."
The council said that Beijing had exposed the fact that the Chinese authorities were not familiar with nor respected freedom of the press.
"In their policy, there is no such thing as press freedom because they tightly control both the local and international media," the council said in a statement issued last night.
Beijing's restrictions on press freedom have drawn international concern and criticism, the statement added, noting that a media watch group, Reporters without Borders, had placed China sixth from the bottom on a list of countries ranked in terms of press freedom.
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:
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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