Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

How can Ma appease the military?

J. Michael Cole

President Ma Ying-jeou’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administration is now bound and driven by big business and financial institutions to a degree that is probably unprecedented in the history of the party.

Given the close relationship between big business, the banking sector and the KMT, it comes as no surprise that Ma’s cross-strait policies have been tremendously beneficial to those sectors.

A muted response to real disaster

Taipei Times

Over the past few days, volunteers and Netizens across the nation have turned their compassion into action, serving as rescue workers and searching for typhoon victims and transporting relief aid, or donating money and disseminating rescue and missing persons information via e-mail, Twitter, Plurk, Facebook and other social networking Web sites.

Yet the broadcast and print media continue to be filled with heartrending images of frightened survivors recounting narrow escapes, tearful villages wailing for their missing or dead loved ones and horrifying scenes of villages annihilated by water, rocks and mudslides.

A president far from his people

Taipei Times

As hundreds of people wait for news of missing loved ones and hundreds of thousands mourn the damage to their towns, homes, shops and fields, solace is needed as urgently as relief efforts. But victims of Typhoon Morakot looking to President Ma Ying-jeou for that solace will be disappointed.

Timing critical for battling A(H1N1)

Ih-jen Su

Global data for infection and mortality rates associated with the A(H1N1) influenza, or swine flu, are becoming clearer as time goes on. Twelve people have already fallen seriously ill in Taiwan, and the nation’s first death from this new viral strain occurred on July 30.

A(H1N1) has become pandemic in the southern hemisphere and tropical countries, so it is almost unavoidable that a pandemic will occur in the northern hemisphere this coming autumn and winter. The estimated fatality rates for the virus vary from a low of 0.4 percent to as high as 2 percent, as reported in New York. The death rate in Mexico in April was even worse.

More Articles...