The government will have to wait on its request to buy 66 F-16C/D jet fighters from the US, a daily newsletter said in Washington on Friday.
The report came just days after the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday approved a resolution that aims to put pressure on the administration of US President George W. Bush to allow Taiwan to purchase the fighter aircraft, despite US State Department efforts to obstruct the sale.
The Nelson Report, which caters to politicians in the US capital, quoted sources close to the Bush administration as saying that the purchase would not happen soon, if at all.
The sources said that the White House, not the State Department or the Department of Defense, was blocking the deal.
The report also said that Bush was holding on to control over US-Taiwan policy and was concerned that sending positive signals to President Chen Shui-bian (
Although the Taiwan Relations Act allows the US to sell arms to Taiwan based solely on Taiwan's defense needs, the report said that the Bush administration felt separating the issue from US-China relations was difficult.
The report quoted the sources as saying that the Taiwan Relations Act did not necessarily justify the sale of F-16s to Taiwan's military and that the administration was debating Taiwan's defense needs.
Fast food chain McDonald's is to raise prices by up to NT$5 on some products at its restaurants across Taiwan, starting on Wednesday next week, the company announced today. The prices of all extra value meals and sharing boxes are to increase by NT$5, while breakfast combos and creamy corn soup would go up by NT$3, the company said in a statement. The price of the main items of those meals, if ordered individually, would remain the same. Meanwhile, the price of a medium-sized lemon iced tea and hot cappuccino would rise by NT$3, extra dipping sauces for chicken nuggets would go up
Yangmingshan National Park’s Qingtiangang (擎天崗) nature area has gone viral after a park livestream camera observed a couple in the throes of intimate congress, which was broadcast live on YouTube, drawing large late-night crowds and sparking a backlash over noise, bright lights and disruption to wildlife habitat. The area’s livestream footage appeared to show a couple engaging in sexual activity on a picnic table in the park on Friday last week, with the uncensored footage streamed publicly online. The footage quickly spread across social media, prompting a tide of visitors to travel to the site to “check in” and recreate the
GROUNDED: A KMT lawmaker proposed eliminating drone development programs and freezing funding for counterdrone systems, despite China’s adoption of the technology China has deployed attack drones at air bases near the Taiwan Strait in a strategy aimed at overwhelming Taiwan’s air defense systems through saturation attacks, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said. The council’s latest quarterly report on China said that satellite imagery and open-source intelligence indicate that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had converted retired J-6 fighter jets into J-6W drones, which the PLA has stationed at six air bases near Taiwan, five in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province. The report cited J. Michael Dahm, a senior fellow at the US-based Mitchell Institute, as saying that China has
Carrefour Taiwan is to begin using a new name from the start of July, but it cannot divulge the name until then, the chairman of the supermarket chain's parent company said today. President Chain Store Co chairman Lo Chih-hsien (羅智先) was asked by reporters after a shareholders' meeting to confirm whether the company has settled on a new name for the supermarket brand. In March, the government-registered name of two Carrefour Taiwan branches was quietly changed to "Le Chia Kang" (樂家康) in Chinese, raising speculation that has been selected as the name. Lo said that because of local regulations and contractual obligations, the
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