INCINERATION: Four more pork products seized at airports were found to contain the African swine fever virus, bringing the total to 18 as of yesterday

Taipei Times
Date: Jan 26, 2019
By: Lin Chia-nan  /  Staff reporter

Raw pork products should be disposed of in regular garbage bins for incineration, the

Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said yesterday, after media reports questioned whether the agency’s policy contradicts that of the Council of Agriculture (COA).

Raw leftovers were previously used to make compost, but in light of the African swine fever threat, the agency earlier this year began encouraging people to treat unwanted pig products as general garbage to be incinerated, EPA Deputy Minister Shen Chih-hsiu (沈志修) said.

The agency has required local environmental bureaus to advertise the policy on garbage truck loudspeakers, he said.

However, the Chinese-language United Daily News yesterday reported that COA Deputy Minister Huang Chin-cheng (黃金城) disapproved of the EPA’s policy.    [FULL  STORY]

Radio Taiwan International 
Date: 24 January, 2019
By: Natalie Tso

Taiwan’s navy publicly showcased its Albatross drone take off for the first time on Thursday. This comes as the defense ministry holds exercises as the Chinese New Year holiday approaches.

This drone was created by National Chung-shan Institute of Science and Technology. The navy began using the Albatross  in September 2017. The drone can conduct surveillance and reconnaissance work day and night.

Taiwan’s defense ministry is stepping up military exercises as Chinese New Year approaches. Naval officer Liu Shih-chang said there are three levels of certificates for drone operators. The drone offers a third perspective.

It’s not easy to be an Albatross drone operator. You need to be a qualified air plane pilot. Operators also need to pass a virtual monitor test, which is much like a video game.  Naval officer Hsien Min Tsang said they will evaluate a person’s personal and professional qualifications and their skills in handling the drone. They also need to pass a test in the simulator. They need to pass all these tests before they operate the drone.
[FULL  STORY]

Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je’s comment is simply reflecting his innocence and incompetence.

Taiwan News
Date: 2019/01/24
By: Lee Ping-hua, Taiwan News, Contributing Writer

Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je has come under fire for another odd remark in defense of his contentious cross-strait motto of “the two sides of the strait are one family,” after saying he hates people who advocate independence while doing business in China.

He should, however, have made himself less bitter if he spoke in line with the majority of Taiwanese people by denouncing Beijing’s dissociative state which advocates a cross-strait family, but remains poised for a forced unification.

To reach the end of Taiwan’s unification with China, Beijing is aligning with the pro-China politicians in the island country, and has been using economic incentives as trade-offs to those publicly acknowledging Beijing’s political stance.

For example, last year, the Taiwanese coffee chain 85C Bakery Cafe bowed to China’s backlash over a gift bag given tor Taiwan’s president by reaffirming the 1992 Consensus; Taiwanese-winning baker Wu Pao-chun (吳寶春) was forced to support the same 1992 Consensus following a boycott after being labeled as a pro-independent businessman by Chinese netizens. Many Taiwanese companies in China have no choice but to yield to pressure as politics weighs heavily on their business.    [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2019/01/24
By: Yang Shu-min and William Yen

Taipei, Jan. 24 (CNA) Starting Friday, foreign nationals who fail to pay a fine of NT$200,000 (US$6,472) for attempting to bring pork products into the country from African swine fever (ASF) affected areas will be denied entry, a Council of Agriculture (COA) official said Thursday.

During a press conference organized by the government’s ASF disaster response center, COA deputy chief Huang Chin-Cheng (黃金城) said starting Friday if a foreign national is fined he or she must pay the fine in full or be denied entry to Taiwan.

The earlier measure only denied entry to foreign nationals returning to Taiwan without having paid a fine incurred on their previous trip.

To prevent African swine fever from reaching Taiwan, the government on Dec. 18, 2018 increased the fines for bringing in pork products from countries with ASF outbreaks, with first offenders liable to a fine of NT$200,000 and repeat offenders NT$1 million.
[FULL  STORY]

OUTRAGE: The decision to sentence Sun Kuo-huang to life in prison was condemned by the father of Chang Chih-tien, who Sun killed in November 2010 to steal his identity

Taipei Times
Date: Jan 25, 2019
By: Jason Pan  /  Staff reporter

Sun Kuo-huang (孫國晃) was spared the death sentence yesterday in favor of life

imprisonment in the fourth retrial for 2010 murder of a graduate student in Kaohsiung.

The Kaohsiung Branch of Taiwan High Court found the 42-year-old Sun guilty of the murder of Chang Chih-tien (張志添), a doctoral student at National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology, but overturned the previous convictions that had sentenced him to death.

The judges’ ruling said that while Sun had admitted to the murder in the earlier trials, he had been segregated from society since his earlier convictions, during which time he received educational training, indicting there was a possibility of rehabilitation.

Prosecutors had long argued that Sun, who was 30 at the time of Chang’s death, had murdered him in a bid to steal his identity and avoid serving an eight-year and six-month prison sentence he had received in October 2010 for the repeated rapes of a high-school student in 2006.    [FULL  STORY]

Ko has been slammed for his odd metaphor describing Taiwan-US-China relations like a careless bank robber surrounded by police

Taiwan News
Date: 2019/01/23
By: Sophia Yang, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – Taipei City Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) came under fire for his recent odd metaphor to describe Taiwan-US-China relations, and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairman Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) joined a fellow DPP legislator on Jan. 21 to call on Ko to mind his business as a mayor, and not get involved with cross-strait affairs.

Last week, when asked by a TV host in an interview how Taiwan can well survive a confrontation between the U.S. and China under President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) pro-U.S. foreign policy, the outspoken mayor used an awkward metaphor to reply “There is a robber attempting to rob a bank but failing to notice there stand many cops aside while bagging the money.”

The city government’s deputy spokesperson Chen Kuan-ting (陳冠廷) came to elaborate Ko’s statement right after the interview, saying Ko is trying to emphasize that Taiwan should avoid overly leaning to one side amid the confrontation between the two superpowers, and should make any decisions in the best interests of Taiwanese people.

Despite the clarification, criticism continues to pour in. DPP legislator Tuan Yi-kang (段宜康) took to the Facebook to describe Ko’s pro-China stance and his motto – “the two sides of the strait are one family” – as “a doe with one eye,” in a sarcastic manner.
[FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2019/01/23
By: Yeh Su-ping and William Yen

Taipei, Jan. 23 (CNA) President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) on Wednesday visited a Taiwan

Lottery store in New Taipei and bought some lotto scratch cards, which she said are a business that help fund public welfare.

She said 50 percent of the earning from sales of the scratch card lottery goes toward social welfare, 45 percent toward the country’s National Pension scheme and 5 percent to the National Health Insurance.

“I want to tell everyone that buying Taiwan Lottery tickets really helps public welfare,” Tsai said at the store in the city’s Banqiao District.

In addition, the operation of lottery stores is limited to certain groups of people, namely those with a disability, members of indigenous tribes, and people from low-income single-parent families, she said.    [FULL  STORY]

‘MET A FEW TIMES’: The alleged affair might have affected Kuo Chun-ming’s reputation, pundits said, but pointed to his good performance as head of the utility

Taipei Times
Date: Jan 24, 2019
By: Jason Pan  /  Staff reporter

Taiwan Water Corp (Taiwater) chairman Kuo Chun-ming (郭俊銘) yesterday resigned after

a report that he was having an extramarital affair.

“Due to today’s news report on my actions, which some people might find questionable, and to avoid causing problems for the government, including damaging Taiwater’s image, I hereby resign from my chairman position effective today,” Kuo said in a statement.

The Chinese-language Next Magazine reported that Kuo over the past month took a woman surnamed Yang (楊) to a motel in Taichung on three separate occasions, and published their photographs.

Yang is a deputy manager responsible for sales at a Taichung radio station and her husband, surnamed Huang (黃), is the station’s manager, the magazine said.
[FULL  STORY]

A crucial post-Sunflower debate over China-centric language learning has been rekindled in Taiwan.

The News Lens
Date: 2019/01/22
By: Brian Hioe, 破土 New Bloom

Concerns about Chinese attempts to subtly influence the Taiwanese education system are back in the news.

Reports last month indicated that Chinese language textbooks cowritten by China’s Fujian Normal University and Taiwan’s Chinese Classics Association are in use at 20 high schools in Taiwan, mostly concentrated in Taipei and Kaohsiung. These textbooks were approved last year by the National Academy for Education Research, with some warning that the aim of the textbooks was to subtly influence Taiwanese student’s perceptions of Taiwan and China through language learning, but they received little attention at the time. The project to produce these textbooks was a four-and-a-half year collaborative project, meaning that the project to write these textbooks has been a long-term effort.

Credit: Davidzh / WikicommonsThe campus of Fujian Normal University in Fuzhou, China.
Language learning is oftentimes fraught political territory in Taiwan, with criticisms of the disproportionate focus on classical Chinese in language teaching despite its remoteness from contemporary vernacular language as it is used today in Taiwan. However, political actors in the Kuomintang (KMT)-aligned “pan-Blue” camp have historically called for the preservation of classical Chinese teaching in order to reinforce political claims that Taiwan is part of China. It should also not be surprising that language learning also necessarily engages with Taiwan and China’s respective political histories, seeing students are taught using historical literature from both Taiwan and China, and a specific notion of the political relation between Taiwan and China oftentimes creeps in with regards to what literature is chosen as required reading for students.

Groups supportive of the preservation of classical Chinese education and the current, China-centric curricula tend more often than not to be pan-Blue in nature and they lash out at calls to reduce the portion of classical Chinese used in contemporary Chinese language education as efforts by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)-aligned “pan-Green” camp to realize the “desinicization” of Taiwan and push for “cultural Taiwanese independence.” It is not surprising either, that in opposition, many of those who call for a reduction in the proportion of classical Chinese taught in schools are pro-Taiwan organizations such as the Association for Taiwan Literature and Taiwanese literature scholars involved in cultural contestation over Taiwanese literature in recent years, such as Zhu Youxun (朱宥勳) and others.