The White House is refusing to negotiate with US Senator John Cornyn over his demands for greater “clarity” on whether the US will agree to the future sale of F-16C/D jets to Taiwan.
Despite enormous pressure, US President Barack Obama will not even discuss the issue.
Cornyn is putting the president’s feet to the fire by holding up the nomination of Mark Lippert for the job of US assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs.
It is an important job, and one that would make Lippert — nominated by Obama in October last year — the Pentagon’s top Asia official.
However, under the US political system, a senator has the power to put a “hold” on a presidential nomination and stop it going forward indefinitely.
Soon after the nomination was first made, Senator John McCain put it on hold until he was provided the details of a certain national security issue.
The White House negotiated with McCain, reached a compromise and the senator lifted his hold on the nomination last month.
Cornyn then stepped in and placed a new hold on the nomination — a well-established US Senate tactic to win concessions from the president.
Cornyn is furious because the White House last year refused to sell new F-16s to Taiwan and decided instead to upgrade the old versions of the fighters the country already owns.
The F-16C/Ds that Taiwan has been seeking for years are made in Texas and Taipei’s order for 66 of the fighters would have guaranteed a large number of local jobs that are now under threat as the assembly line prepares to close.
Cornyn has argued for the sale on the grounds that it is required under the Taiwan Relations Act and also that it would provide a desperately needed boost to the US economy.
Obama has not ruled out the sale of F-16C/Ds to Taiwan and his top aides say the issue remains under consideration.
In a letter to the president, Cornyn demanded “clarity” on the issue.
During an election year, with employment and the economy likely to be decisive issues, Cornyn is in effect trying to force the White House to agree to the sale and secure jobs in his home state.
However, sources close to Cornyn said that on this occasion, the White House has remained silent and made no attempt to negotiate with him.
Cornyn said at the end of last week: “More than anything, I’d like to engage in a discussion over how do we solve this problem.”
“So far they seem to act like they can just ignore it and it’s going to go away, but I’m not planning on going away,” he said.
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