Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers yesterday blocked a move by opposition parties to stop the sale of Next Media Group’s Taiwanese outlets to a group of buyers including the Want Want China Times Group.
Concerned that the group will dominate Taiwan’s media landscape if the deal goes through, the Democratic Progressive Party and the Taiwan Solidarity Union caucuses yesterday proposed a resolution regarding the deal.
The opposition called for the Free Trade Commission, the Financial Supervisory Commission, the National Communications Commission, and the Investment Commission at the Ministry of Economic Affairs to adopt strict standards in their respective reviews of the deal to prevent a media monopoly which could endanger freedom of speech.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
They said the deal was contrary to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which enshrines the right to freedom of expression and states that media monopolies are an unacceptable interference with free speech.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) in May 2009 unilaterally ratified the convention, along with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
Although the UN failed to recognize the ratification as Taiwan is not a member of the body, the legislation was approved later that year to bring domestic human rights standards in line with the UN covenants.
In the draft resolution, the opposition parties demanded that the Fair Trade Commission hold public hearings under the Administrative Procedure Act (行政程序法), conclusions of which have legal effect, to make information regarding how the deal will affect the media and its review of the case available to the public.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: