A daily breakdown of Taiwan’s top stories and why they matter.

The News Lens
Date: 2019/03/04
By: TNL Daily News

Canadian diplomat and LGBT+ advocate Michael McCulloch told CNA Taiwan’s move to legalize gay marriage, via a newly submitted draft bill, is a global victory – but a challenge from opponents of same-sex marriage has emerged within Taiwan’s legislature.

McCulloch, who is the director of general relations at the Canadian Trade Office in Taipei – Canada’s de facto embassy in Taiwan – called the draft legislation “a win for the people of the world,” comparing Taiwan’s long fight to legalize same-sex marriage to the process Canada went through between 2003 and 2005, when the North American country passed legislation to legalize same-sex marriage.

However, Mirror Media reported on Mar. 2 that groups opposed to marriage equality plan to propose legislation, titled “The Enforcement Act of Referendum No. 12,” that would define same-sex unions as non-marital relationships and limit such unions to citizens who are at least 20 years old. The draft bill is backed by 29 legislators, Mirror Media reports.

Referendum No. 12, which voters approved in November 2018, read: “Do you agree to types of unions, other than those stated in the marriage regulations in the Civil Code, to protect the rights of same-sex couples who live together permanently?”     [FULL  STORY]

The woman had already served jail time for drink driving in 2017

Taiwan News
Date: 2019/03/04
By: Ryan Drillsma, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — A woman from Taitung (台東) was sentences to three years and six months in prison on Monday following the death of her 14-year-old daughter due to a drink-driving incident.

CNA reports the woman, surnamed Lin (林), who already had four counts of driving under the influence and her license revoked, was carrying her daughter on the back of a scooter when she crashed into two cars last year. Her daughter died after sustaining critical injuries.

The verdict stated Lin had already been charged four times with driving under the influence and was handed a five-month sentence in 2016, which she completed in Sept. 2017. Her license was revoked after the incident.

In June last year, Lin hit two consecutive cars parked at the side of the road when driving through Beinan Township (卑南鄉) in Taitung. Her daughter, who was riding on the back of the scooter, sustained serious head injuries and was immediately sent to hospital but did not recover. Lin was also taken in for medical treatment.    [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2019/03/04
By: Ko Lin

Taipei, March 4 (CNA) Taiwan is the top country in Asia in terms of giving women and men equal rights under the law, according to a women’s empowerment study released recently by the World Bank.

The study, titled “Women, Business and the Law 2019: A Decade of Reform,” examines laws and regulations affecting women’s prospects as entrepreneurs and employees across 187 economies worldwide for the past 10 years.

It employs eight indicators — Going Places, Starting a Job, Getting Paid, Getting Married, Having Children, Running a Business, Managing Assets and Getting a Pension — that are structured around women’s interactions with the law as they begin, progress through and end their careers.

Taiwan scored full marks in all five indexes, except for Having Children, Running a Business and Getting a Pension, for which it scored 80, 75 and 75, respectively.    [FULL  STORY]

DISCRIMINATION: China sent an invitation to the WHO vaccines conference in Beijing on the same day the conference was being held, the minister of foreign affairs said

Taipei Times
Date: Mar 05, 2019
By: Lu Yi-hsuan and William Hetherington  /  Staff reporter, with staff writer

Taiwan did not participate in a WHO-organized vaccines conference in Beijing on Feb. 21 to protest the

global body’s denigration of the country, Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) said yesterday.

The WHO again left the issue of Taiwan’s participation to be handled by Beijing, which did not send an invitation until 1am on Feb. 21, the same day it was held in Beijing, Wu said at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee.

Despite insisting that no one should be left behind when it comes to healthcare, the WHO always excludes Taiwan, Wu said, adding that he hoped the organization could engage in greater introspection and overcome its discriminatory treatment of the nation.

He made the statements in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Mary Chen’s (陳曼麗) question on why going to the conference would have been a problem and why the ministry could not provide airline tickets for a delegation to attend it.    [FULL  STORY]

New Bloom Magazine
Date: 03/03/2019
By: William Langley

AN IMPASSIONED, at times desperate, public debate, the imminent threat of irrelevancy, and existential angst induced by the looming presence of a larger neighbour. With President Tsai Ing-wen’s Taiwan seemingly on a collision course with mainland China, and with Theresa May’s latest frustrated attempts to extricate the UK from the EU, all are increasingly pervasive features of the political climates on the two small islands at either end of Eurasia.

In the UK and in Taiwan, the relationship between the island and mainland neighbour is both historic and contemporary. In many ways, these relationships are similar.

Firstly, the modern-day majority populations of both Taiwan and the UK are largely the result of historic immigration from the mainland. During the wars of the 20th century, both islands saw an increase in this migration, receiving mainland migrants who would play a major role in the shape of their host countries’ modern fates.

What’s more, both island-nations are separated from the landmasses that represent both their closest cultural relatives and their bitterest rivals by just a narrow strip of water: at their widest, the Taiwan Strait is just 220 kilometers and the British Channel, 240 kilometers (or 150 miles, depending on which side of it you fall on). And yet, on both islands, one finds a people with a sense of distinctness, born of the separation from the history, politics, and affairs of the neighbouring continents, afforded to them by those narrow strips of water.    [FULL  STORY]

Taiwan News
Date: 2019/03/03
By:  Central News Agency

The family of a 14-year-old boy who secretly owned a motorcycle has collected NT$250,000 (US$8,100.57) worth of traffic tickets as a result of the teenager riding without a license and breaking other traffic regulations for about six months, a city councilor said Sunday.

The 31 tickets were issued between May and October last year, after the teen bought a secondhand motorbike with money he had made from a part-time job, New Taipei Councilor Lin Kuo-chun (林國春) said.

The boy’s father did not find out about the tickets until Jan. 31 because they had been sent to the address on his official household registration, which is in Tainan, while he was actually living in New Taipei, according to a local media report.

The tickets, totaling NT$250,000, were for infractions that included from driving without a license, Lin said.
[FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2019/03/03
By: Liu Chien-pang and Evelyn Kao

Taipei, March 3 (CNA) A Filipino man has been arrested on suspicion of killing two of his crew members on a Taiwan-registered fishing boat in the Indian Ocean last month, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said Saturday.

The suspect was arrested at sea Saturday after the members of a special task force from Taiwan talked him into surrendering and he will be brought back to Taiwan for questioning, the CGA said in a statement.

The man is suspected of killing two crew members and injuring several others, while the other crew members were forced to jumped overboard during and after the knife attack on board the Wen Peng on Feb. 20.

At the time, the Pingtung-registered fishing boat was sailing in the Indian Ocean, approximately 1,540 nautical miles from the Mauritius capital of Port Louis, carrying a crew of 24 — three Taiwanese, 10 Filipinos and 11 Indonesians, according to Taiwan investigators.    [FULL  STORY]

Taipei Times
Date: Mar 04, 2019
By: Wu Liang-yi and Jake Chung  /  Staff reporter, with staff writer

Most of the food products sold at convenience stores that claim to contain fresh strawberries instead

contain food additives and not the actual fruit, an investigative report by the Chinese-language Liberty Times (sister newspaper of the Taipei Times) has found.

Capitalizing on the strawberry season, which lasts from December to April, many convenience stores and food producers have launched products that purportedly contain fresh strawberries.

Of the nation’s four major convenience store chain operators, President Chain Store Corp’s (統一超商) 7-Eleven and Taiwan FamilyMart Co (全家便利商店) each sell about 40 products claiming to contain strawberries.

However, none of the products sold at 7-Eleven stores and only two at Taiwan FamilyMart stores actually contained strawberries, while of the 18 strawberry food products sold at Pxmart (全聯實業), only half contained the fruit, the report found.    [FULL  STORY]

New Bloom
Date: 03/02/2019 
By: Brian Hioe

A CHINESE YOUTUBE vlogger who has in the past expressed support for Taiwanese democracy surnamed Liu reported last week that his mother has been detained by the National Security Bureau for over four days in his native Suzhou. The disappearance of Liu’s mother should be concerning, not only within Taiwan but to Chinese supporters of Taiwan—even if they live outside of China.

Liu runs a vlog on YouTube with over 20,000 followers by the name of “Vlog心聲”. Liu has been studying in the United States since October of last year and took advantage of being outside of China to critically comment on Chinese politics. With regards to the relation of Taiwan and China, Liu has stated that he hopes one day that China will be democratic and that the 23 million people of Taiwan will be able to freely decide whether they want to be part of China or not.

This would be a position which is not explicitly supporting Taiwanese independence, simply one that would call for Taiwan’s democratic rights to self-determination to be respected. Nevertheless, this and Liu’s other commentary may still have incited Chinese authorities to take action against Liu’s mother.   [FULL  STORY]

A 30 year old man, surnamed Hou, was arrested Friday morning on suspicion of murder in the death of a 64 year old man surnamed Chang

Taiwan News
Date: 2019/03/02
By: Duncan Deaeth, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPE (Taiwan News) – A drunken brawl between two men in Nantou City on Thursday night led to one’s death and the other being arrested on suspicion of murder.

A 30 year old man, surnamed Hou (侯), was arrested Friday morning and transferred to the Nantou District Inspection Office on Friday evening after confessing to killing a 64 year old man, surnamed Chang (張), on Thursday, Feb. 28.

According to an Apple Daily report, police officers were called to a building in Nantou City around 7:00 p.m. by neighbors who reported a disturbance. Officers found large amounts of blood on the first floor of the residence and in the stairwell between the first and second floor.

Officers then discovered Zhang’s dead body inside his home’s bathtub on the second floor. He reportedly died from severe blood loss, caused by blunt force trauma to the side of his head.    [FULL  STORY]