Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) said yesterday that he would not criticize President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), but his vice president, Annette Lu (呂秀蓮), said she wouldn't hesitate.
Lu said that the people are the lord and master of the president and vice president, and she had the right to speak her mind now that she is a civilian again.
“Why can’t I criticize them?” she said while addressing a roomful of supporters attending an event organized by Lu’s office.
Lu said she feared Ma’s administration would make the economy like that of Penghu, the country’s politics like those of Hong Kong, turn the country into an international orphan and make its national sovereignty a fiction.
Lu said she “got goose bumps” when she read that prosecutors had named Chen as a defendant in the state fund case shortly after he left office.
She said it would only be fair if prosecutors investigated Chen’s predecessors as well.
Chen, who attended the event, said he would be happy to offer his personal opinions in private when he had the chance. He said he always remembered what former US president Bill Clinton told him when he visited Taipei in February 2005 — that he never publicly denounced US President George W. Bush although he did not agree with him.
Chen also asked his supporters not to address him as the president.
“There is only one president and it is the sitting president, Mr Ma Ying-jeou,” Chen said. “Please call me A-bian [his nickname].”
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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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