Taipei Times
Date: Aug 12, 2018
By: Sean Lin  /  Staff reporter

National Chengchi University late on Friday night said it had removed a bronze

statue of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), its first president, from its campus in accordance with a resolution passed in January at an internal meeting of faculty and student representatives.

The statue, which formerly stood at the university’s library, was relocated to Hua Hsing Children’s Home — founded by Chiang’s wife Soong Mayling (宋美齡) — in Taipei’s Shilin District (士林), the school said.

The internal meeting was held to decide which of two statues of Chiang would be removed, with the one in the library chosen by a vote of 54 to 37.

The other Chiang statue, which portrays him on horseback, remains on a hill on campus

In an apparent attempt to downplay the issue, the university issued a news release about the statue’s relocation just before midnight on Friday.    [FULL  STORY]

Radio Taiwan International
Date: 2018-08-10

A new exhibition has opened in Taipei to mark the 60th anniversary of a historic

cross-strait artillery battle, the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1958.

On August 23, 1958, China’s People’s Liberation Army began an intense artillery bombardment of the island of Kinmen, then better known as Quemoy. The island lies a short distance off the coast of mainland China, and had been held by the Nationalist forces of the Republic of China following their retreat to Taiwan in 1949, along with the Matsu islands further to the north.

Over the course of the following month and a half, close to half a million shells fell on Kinmen, with Nationalist forces returning fire. Around 400 Nationalist soldiers were killed, with 460 troops killed on the Chinese side. The Eisenhower administration of the United States responded to Taiwan’s request for aid by sending American naval vessels to protect supply lines to the islands.    [FULL  STORY]

Taiwan, South Korea, Spain, and China have aggressively subsidized vessel and fuel costs to encourage their fleets to operate thousands of kilometers from their home ports.

The News Lens
Date: 2018/08/10

• According to a recent study in the journal Science Advances, the average distance industrial fishing fleets travel from their home ports to fishing grounds is twice what it was in the 1950s, expanding the total area of the world’s oceans that are fished from 60 to 90 percent.
• Despite ranging farther afield and fishing in new waters, however, the fleets of the top 20 fishing countries — collectively responsible for 80 percent of the global industrial fishing catch — are hauling in far smaller amounts of fish.
• Today, about 7 metric tons of fish are caught per 1,000 kilometers (about 621 miles) traveled by those 20 countries’ fleets, less than a third of the more than 25 metric tons they caught per 1,000 kilometers traveled in the 1950s.
  Industrial fishing fleets are traveling ever-farther across the globe in pursuit of a dwindling haul of fish, a new study finds.

Researchers with Sea Around Us, a research initiative spearheaded by the University of Western Australia (UWA) and the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada, produced high-resolution maps of fish catches between 1950 and 2014 in order to examine the geographic expansion of industrial fishing. Their results were detailed in the journal Science Advances last week.

According to the study, the average distance industrial fishing fleets travel from their home ports to fishing grounds is twice what it was in the 1950s, expanding the total area of the world’s oceans that are fished from 60 to 90 percent.
[FULL  STORY]

Investigators found discrepancies between man’s statements and cellphone data

Taiwan News 
Date: 2018/08/10
By: Matthew Strong, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – Police submitted a suspect to a lie detector test to find

out whether he was an accomplice in the gruesome murder of a woman at the Huashan Grassland last May, reports said Friday.

An archery teacher surnamed Chen (陳) strangled and dismembered a 30-year-old student of his, surnamed Kao (高), after she rejected his sexual advances, before dispersing her body parts at several locations, including a hillside in Yangmingshan and a refrigerator at his home.

Reports in the media suggested that another set of DNA might have been found on some of the evidence, launching a theory that Chen might have had an accomplice.    [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2018/08/10
By: Yeh Tzu-kang and CNA intern Wang Szu-chi 

Taipei, Aug. 10 (CNA) Anthony Pierrot (畢耀遠), a Catholic priest from the Netherlands, has been named an honorary citizen of Yunlin County for his contributions to the county for over 60 years.

Yunlin County Magistrate Lee Chin-yung (李進勇) presented the priest with a certificate confirming the honor and praised him for the many years he has spent caring for Taiwan’s needy at Pierrot’s 96th birthday party at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Huwei Township on Friday.

Born in 1923 in the Netherlands, Pierrot has supported the promotion of health care and made significant contributions to Yunlin since he came to Taiwan in 1954.    [FULL  STORY]

HIGH PRESSURE: With three weeks to go until a deadline, a KMT representative asked if the responsible institute’s president and vice president might have been made to resign

Taipei Times
Date: Aug 11, 2018
By: Rachel Lin, Shih Hsiao-kuan and Jake Chung  /  Staff reporters, with staff writer

The Ministry of Education’s meeting on the 12-year national education curriculum

is to convene at the National Academy for Educational Research (NAER) today to review the draft guidelines for social science subjects, with Minister Yeh Jiunn-rong (葉俊榮) chairing the panel.

The ministry has been rushing to finish its review of the guidelines by the end of the month, which is necessary for the guidelines to take effect at the start of the schoolyear next year. Over the summer, it has increased the frequency of review sessions, which were previously held on Sundays.

Draft guidelines for social science subjects propose to reduce the amount of rote memorization at high schools and shift the focus of history textbooks from a Han ethnicity-centered history to the history of Taiwan over the past 500 years.

The draft curriculum proposes to turn the three subdivisions in history textbooks — History of Taiwan, History of China and World History — into three separate courses worth two credits each, named “Taiwan and related history,” “China and East Asia” and “Taiwan and the World.”    [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2018/08/09
By: Yu Hsiao-han and Ko Lin

Taipei, Aug. 9 (CNA) A science documentary about the Taiwan-led Greenland

Telescope (GLT) project will make its world premiere at National Taiwan University’s (NTU) Astronomy Mathematics Building on Aug. 17, Academia Sinica announced Thursday.

“Dome of the Sky – Observing Black Holes from Greenland” is a documentary that captured the final installment of the GLT, a joint development project between Academia Sinica’s Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA) and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in the United States, for the observation of super-massive black holes.

The GLT project was initiated in 2011, when the U.S. National Science Foundation presented the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) with a 12-meter radio antenna to deploy and operate in Greenland, according to Taiwan’s top research institution.    [FULL  STORY]

ENDORSEMENT: A Nangang borough warden and a Taipei commissioner are facing expulsion from the party after they endorsed Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je’s re-election bid

Taipiei Times
Date: Aug 10, 2018
By: Sheng Pei-yao and Jonathan Chin  /  Staff reporter, with staff writer

Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday urged the Democratic Progressive

Party (DPP) to refrain from using ideology to censor its members, after DPP Deputy Secretary-General Hsu Chia-ching (徐佳青) on Wednesday said that the party would expel any member stumping for Ko after Aug. 31, the candidate registration deadline for the November elections.

“Those who stump for Ko will have to make the choice between voluntarily withdrawing from the party and exclusion,” Hsu told SET-TV host Cheng Hung-yi (鄭弘儀).

The decision followed reports that several DPP Taipei city councilors and borough wardens have broken ranks with DPP Legislator Pasuya Yao (姚文智), the party’s Taipei mayoral candidate.

The DPP’s Taipei chapter on Monday voted against nominating Nangang District (南港) Xixin Borough (西新) Warden Chiu Pi-chu (邱碧珠) for re-election, after Chiu endorsed Ko on multiple occasions.    [FULL  STORY]

Radio Taiwan International
Date: 2018-08-09

The state-owned Taiwan Power Company said Thursday that electricity prices

need to be raised to stop the company from operating at a loss.

Taipower introduced a new electricity pricing policy in October 2017. The policy allows the company to negotiate a price increase of up to 3% in April and October every year.

The proposed increase needs to be approved by the electricity price review committee before taking effect. In March, the committee rejected Taipower’s proposal to increase the electricity rate by 10.4% and limited the raise to 3%.    [FULL  STORY]

 

Taiwan’s gesture of diplomatic goodwill just set an unnerving precedent that affects over 150,000 Filipinos working legally on the island.

The News Lens
Date: 2018/08/09
By: Nick Aspinwall

Angelito Banayo, the Philippines’ top envoy to Taipei, thanked Taiwan last week for deporting Ricardo “Ardot” Parojinog, a former city councilor who is suspected of drug trafficking in his home country, in a move that could affect Taiwan’s 150,000-strong Filipino population.

Under the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte, Philippine police have extrajudicially killed between 4,000 and 20,000 suspected drug traffickers and users, and Duterte insists that the practice of denying drug suspects due process will continue. Taiwan’s cooperation thus comes as bad news for any Filipino who is accused of drug crimes by Taiwanese or Philippine authorities, and human rights advocates are deeply worried.

“As a matter of policy, the Taiwanese government should suspend any deportations of Filipinos who have been accused of drug-related offenses in their home country,” Andrea Giorgetta, director of the Asia desk of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), told The News Lens.

In 2017, U.S. federal immigration courts in Hawaii and California blocked the deportations of Filipinos convicted of drug charges when judges said their extraditions, under the Duterte administration, would amount to death sentences, citing the United Nations (UN) Convention Against Torture in the California case.
[FULL  STORY]