Singaporean entrepreneur Joseph Phua (潘杰賢) yesterday said he is to launch a new publication with 96 percent of Apple Daily (Taiwan)’s original staff, as critics continued to call for government scrutiny.
Phua, founder of the streaming platform 17Live, held a news conference yesterday to announce the establishment of Next Apple News.
Phua vowed to refrain from using Apple Daily (Taiwan)’s brand, Web site and assets, and would not have access to personal information.
Photo: CNA
He also promised that Next Apple News would maintain neutrality and abide by the law.
The Web site of Apple Daily (Taiwan) — Apple Online — issued a statement yesterday, saying that it would stop updating content from 11:59pm today.
Apple Daily (Taiwan) said it was sorry that it had to bid farewell to its readers due to a lack of working capital, but added that Next Apple News would continue to shoulder the same responsibility to expose societal injustices.
It also invited people from different ideologies to share their advice with the new company.
“Every piece of your criticism will motivate Next Apple News to do better as it has been for Apple Daily (Taiwan) for the past 19 years,” the statement said.
Meanwhile, the Economic Democracy Union yesterday asked Apple Daily (Taiwan) to destroy its news material and draw up regulations regarding how personal information would be handled after the business closes.
It also called on the Ministry of Culture to supervise the process.
Apple Daily (Taiwan) in a statement on Wednesday last week said that personnel data would be archived for five to seven years before being destroyed, its fiscal and tax information would be archived for five to 10 years before being destroyed, and the data of its subscribers and members, as well as its news material, would be archived forever.
The union said that archiving is different from destroying, so the handling of Apple Daily (Taiwan) might potentially contravene Paragraph 3, Article 11 of the Personal Data Protection Act (個人資料保護法).
It would continue to monitor whether Phua and Next Apple News engage in illegal practices or hurt Taiwan’s democracy, it added.
Additional reporting by Chen Yu-fu
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
The next minimum wage hike is expected to exceed NT$30,000, President William Lai (賴清德) said yesterday during an award ceremony honoring “model workers,” including migrant workers, at the Presidential Office ahead of Workers’ Day today. Lai said he wished to thank the awardees on behalf of the nation and extend his most sincere respect for their hard work, on which Taiwan’s prosperity has been built. Lai specifically thanked 10 migrant workers selected for the award, saying that although they left their home countries to further their own goals, their efforts have benefited Taiwan as well. The nation’s industrial sector and small businesses lay
RSS