The people are the true masters of the country: presidential spokesman

Taiwan News
Date: 2017/03/18
By: Matthew Strong, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – The Presidential Office praised the Sunflower Movement

Saturday, on the third anniversary of the occupation of the Legislative Yuan by mostly students.

The occupation, which lasted for 24 days until April 10, 2014, was directed against an attempt by the then-Kuomintang government to force through an unpopular trade accord with China.

The Sunflower Movement awakened everybody to the fact that the people are the true masters of the country, presidential spokesman Alex Huang said Saturday. He added that the Democratic Progressive Party which took office last May had been pushing through reforms and transformation in the fields of economic progress, trade strategy and wider international space for the nation.    [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2017/03/18
By Kelven Huang and Y.F. Low

0Kaohsiung, March 18 (CNA) A duck farm in Kaohsiung’s Qishan District was

confirmed Saturday to be infected with the highly pathogenic H5N2 avian influenza virus, leading to the culling of 4,457 birds, the city’s Animal Protection Office said.

This was the third bird flu case reported in Kaohsiung, the office said.

As of March 16, 92 poultry farms in Taiwan had been detected with highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses, and 766,290 birds had been culled, according to the Council of Agriculture.    [FULL  STORY]

RESTOREDYang Pan-chyr said that National Taiwan University is a valuable asset and that he would resign to protect the reputation and achievements of the institution

Taipei Times
Date: ar 19, 2017
By: Sean Lin / Staff reporter

National Taiwan University (NTU) president Yang Pan-chyr (楊泮池) yesterday said he

would resign after his term expires in June, because he does not want allegations of academic misconduct to continue be directed at the university in the wake of suspected breaches of academic integrity involving him and former NTU professor Kuo Min-liang (郭明良).

“I am the coauthor of some of the research papers being investigated, but I did not breach academic ethics and I was unaware of the issues in [Kuo’s] laboratory,” Yang said, referring to four potentially problematic papers he cowrote with Kuo’s research team between 2004 and 2006.

The school late last month dismissed Kuo and professor of dentistry Chang Cheng-chi (張正琪) over the matter.    [FULL  STORY]

The China Post
Date: March 19, 2017
By: The China Post news staff

Activists Saturday marked the third anniversary of the Sunflower Movement, with a

protest outside the Legislature criticizing the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) “slow progress” in enacting a law to make negotiations between the government and Beijing more transparent.

The Sunflower Movement began on March 18, 2014 when students, civic groups and other civil society activists occupied the Legislature in protest at the then-ruling Kuomintang administration’s plans to push through a cross-strait trade and services pact.

Saturday’s demonstration was led by Lin Fei-fan and Chen Wei-ting, two of the leaders of the occupation, which ended April 10 after activists secured concessions from the then-Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng.    [FULL  STORY]

The News Lens
Date: 2017/03/17
By: Brian Hioe

With the indictment of former Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou, Brian Hioe observes that Ma facing jail time ‘may threaten the international perception of Taiwan as a democracy.’

Many questions remain to be answered in coming days with the indictment of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) on charges over leaks of classified information regarding the 2013 wiretapping of Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘), then the minority speaker of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus. The case dates back to the so-called September Political Crisis of 2013, in which Ker was accused of seeking aid from Wang Jin-pyng (王金平), then the majority speaker of the Kuomintang (KMT), to get Tseng Yung-fu (曾勇夫), the Minister of Justice, to not pursue charges against Ker for illegal lobbying.
[FULL  STORY]

Taiwan News
Date: 2017/03/17
By: Sophia Yang, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – Following two weeks of investigations after several renowned

Taiwanese universities were found to have signed deals with their Chinese counterparts to exclude politically sensitive topics in textbooks or courses offered to Chinese students at schools, Education Minister Pan Wen-chung (潘文忠) concluded Friday that a total of 72 universities or colleges has signed the equivalents with China in the period between 2005 and 2017.

Pan added that such inter-school agreements will be required to be submitted for review and approval at least one month before the signing, while the clauses should not infringe the freedom of expression at schools.

The 72 schools involved in the inappropriate agreements will receive a warning letter from the ministry for their negligence in honoring the Act Governing Relations between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area.    [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2017/03/17
By: Scarlett Cai and Elizabeth Hsu

Taipei, March 17 (CNA) The Republic of China (Taiwan) Ministry of Foreign Affairs

(MOFA) has declared that no code of conduct in the South China Sea will be binding on Taiwan if it is cast out of the negotiations and dialogues aimed at creating a set of rules to avoid conflict among rival claimants in the waters.

The declaration was made Friday in response to what the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs spokesman Charles Jose had told CNA, that all member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) adhere to the “one China” policy.

As a result, regarding Taiwan’s claims in the South China Sea, the ASEAN sees China as the representative in negotiations concerning the claims, Jose said.
[FULL  STORY]

REASON FOR UNIFICATION?DPP lawmaker Lin Chun-hsien said regulations were such that the KMT needed unification with China to be able to cash the gold bonds

Taipei Times
Date: Mar 18, 2017
By: Stacy Hsu / Staff reporter

The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) yesterday said it has discovered gold bonds

issued by the Republic of China (ROC) government in 1947 worth nearly NT$38.5 billion (US$1.258 billion), touting the find as proof of the party’s contributions to the nation.

KMT Administration and Management Committee director Chiu Da-chan (邱大展) said the large batch of gold bonds, found during the KMT’s recent inspection of its assets, are still in good condition.

“These gold bonds had been recorded multiple times in the party’s documents and were transported to Taiwan during the [Chinese Civil] war, before being stored in 68 boxes and placed in the trust of CTBC Bank Co (中國信託銀行),” Chiu told a news conference in Taipei.

The bonds remain in the bank, as the KMT’s request last year to retrieve them was denied, he said.    [FULL  STORY]

The China Post
Date: March 18, 2017
By: The China Post news staff

This week, the Environmental Protection Administration announced new guidance on toilet paper: Toilet paper should now be thrown in the toilet and not in the trash can. Locals may need time to adjust, but apparently newcomers won’t. We accosted foreign visitors to find out what they had been doing with their toilet paper in Taiwan.

Paolo & Gwen from Singapore

Paolo: I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to. I just don’t know shit.

Gwen: I saw signs! In the bathroom, they do tell you not to flush. But I do it anyway. In Singapore, everybody flushes and there are no problems. In Taiwan, there are no problems — you just hold flush a little longer.

Vincent Fong from Hong Kong

I have always flushed the toilet paper. I don’t live in Taiwan but I have lived in China, and I know the majority of Chinese, their culture is not to throw it in the toilet — they usually separate it. I don’t know why. But Hong Kong, everybody puts it in the toilet.

So in China, I still flush it. In Taiwan — and I have been here many times — every time I come here, I still flush it! No problems. For 10, 15 years, I have been flushing it down with no problems.    [FULL  STORY]

The News Lens
Date: 2017/03/16
By: Jules Quartly

China and Taiwan offer different models for tackling the worldwide problem of fake news, top-down or bottom-up. Take your pick…

Having worked on an independence-leaning newspaper in Taiwan and a state-run daily in China, I found both were partly propaganda tools and content to bend facts to purpose. At one I couldn’t print cute pictures of pandas, at the other I wasn’t allowed to talk about the country’s leaders.

Though most of the job was getting facts straight and reporting the same news as everyone else, there was editorialization and bias, peddling political influence and cohabiting with big business through advertising. Fake news wasn’t so much of an issue.

Essentially, these papers agreed what the news was, or wasn’t, and put their own slant on it. Faced with a rapidly changing internet-based media environment they were slow to shift from cutting down trees and shoving papers through doors to going online. More recently, they have been left bemused by the rise of search engines and social media.2    [FULL  STORY]