Hundreds of former Republic of China Marine Corps members gathered at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei yesterday to protest the Ministry of National Defense’s plan to put the Marine Corps under the command of the Republic of China Army.
While delivering a report to the Legislative Yuan in March, Minster of National Defense Yen Ming (嚴明) said that the ministry was considering merging the Marine Corps into the army in an initiative called the Yong Ku project.
“We do not believe President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) promise that the Yong Ku project will not result in the total disbanding the Marine Corps and the military police headquarters,” protest convener Hsu Ting-pang (許定邦) said yesterday, adding that even if the corps were not disbanded, the merger would still weaken it too much.
Photo: CNA
Hsu said he hoped the protest would encourage the country to strengthen national consciousness education, be 100 percent forthcoming toward the dangers facing it, increase defense spending and bolster the procurement of weapons and defensive equipment.
“We hope the government will rescind its policy of having an all-volunteer armed forces and return to the half-compulsory, half-voluntary system,” Hsu said, adding that the demonstrators also want the government to reinstate the policy of keeping garrisons on outlying islands, as well as carry out a review on the current formation of the armed forces.
“The nation should seek to re-establish its dignity and forbid its retired generals from visiting China,” Hsu said.
The former marines call themselves the “Fire Ants” in a nod to the red shirts they wore for the event that bore the words “A Marine for a day, A Marine for Life.”
Hsu said yesterday was the second time the group has met to convey a message to the government, adding that the rally attended by hundreds of former marines had been three weeks in the planning.
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