Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

NGOs form ECFA monitoring group

Taipei Times

Unsatisfied with what they called a lack of transparency surrounding cross-strait negotiations, Taiwanese NGOs yesterday launched a cross-strait-agreement monitoring alliance aimed at increasing public accountability and protecting democratic values.

The initiative, which has drawn support from human rights, labor and government watchdog groups, aims to increase pressure on the government to publicize its agreements with China, which they say have so far been shrouded in secrecy.

Miaoli farmers plead for action

Taipei Times

More than 100 residents from Miaoli County’s Jhunan Township (竹南) and their supporters staged demonstrations again in front of the Executive Yuan and the Presidential Office yesterday, urging the central government to intervene in the county government’s takeover of their land.

“Help us! We’re about to become homeless,” Huang Shu-e (黃淑娥), a resident of Jhunan’s Dapu (大埔), a farming village, told the crowd in front of the Presidential Office.

The Korean War and the fate of Taiwan

Chen Yi-shen 陳儀深

The Korean War began with North Korean leader Kim Il-sung launching an attack on Seoul, South Korea’s capital on June 25, 1950. This attack, was made with the tacit approval of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and three days later, Seoul succumbed to Kim’s forces.

On June 27, then-US president Harry Truman ordered the US Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait to protect Taiwan from invasion by communist forces. Subsquently, a UN force, led by General Douglas MacArthur, was formed on July 7, following a decision by the UN Security Council. Those forces landed at Incheon shortly after and pushed the forces of North Korea back. At this point, however, Kim called on Mao Zedong (毛澤東) to dispatch his troops to the Korean Peninsula.

China lobbying provokes freeze on US arms sales

Taipei Times

The president of the US-Taiwan Business Council yesterday confirmed a report in a US-based defense magazine that the US State Department had frozen US congressional notifications for new arms sales to Taiwan “until at least spring next year.”

Citing sources in Taipei and Washington, Defense News on Monday wrote that the suspension was the direct result of “effective lobbying by Beijing.”

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