The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday accused Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) of arranging more than five interviews with media on Wednesday, International Workers’ Day, to avoid meeting with workers protesting over deteriorating working conditions.
The premier preferred talking to reporters than meeting more than 50,000 workers who braved the heavy rain, which showed that “the premier and President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) only want to talk about what they have done and never want to listen to what the people have to say,” DPP spokesperson Wang Min-sheng (王閔生) told a press conference.
Wang said Jiang tried to use the interviews to avoid meeting with the protesters and to neutralize coverage of the demonstrations.
While the premier enjoyed talking about his achievements, none of the issues he mentioned in the interviews — the referendum on the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant, pension reforms, the National Health Insurance Program’s supplementary premium, the 12-year compulsory education program and economic growth — has been completed, Wang said.
Jiang should concentrate on delivering on his promises rather than making new ones, DPP spokesperson Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) said.
Asked about reports that Jiang had launched a probe into potential corruption in the Cabinet, Lin said Ma had promised integrity in his government, but there has only been widespread corruption instead.
If the government was serious about fighting corruption, it should support “sunshine laws” by amending the Party Act (政黨法) and the Political Donations Act (政治獻金法), among others, Lin said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift