Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Lai unveils NT$1.25tn defense budget

Taipei Times

President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday announced a NT$1.25 trillion (US$39.9 billion) special defense budget, which includes funding for a “Taiwan dome” air defense system with high-level detection and interception capabilities.

The funds would be allocated over eight years from next year to 2033, he told a news conference at the Presidential Office in Taipei.

Lai has previously pledged to increase defense spending to 5 percent of GDP as part of an ongoing strategy amid China’s threats of invasion.

Lessons from the Cloudflare crash

Hsiao Hsi-huei 蕭錫惠

On Tuesday last week at 7:30pm, Cloudflare, the world’s largest Internet infrastructure provider offering Web security and traffic acceleration services, had a major crash.

The outage brought down critical online services worldwide, including several essential public and government Web sites in Taiwan, for 45 minutes. The incident was no minor network glitch — it was a serious reminder of digital national security concerns, a global issue Taiwan must be especially alert of.

Having long been a target of Chinese cyberattacks, Taiwan’s dependence on Cloudflare is very risky. The risks include distributed denial-of-service attacks, in which targets are flooded with junk traffic from multiple sources to paralyze the Web site.

Japan to deploy missiles on Yonaguni

Taipei Times

Japanese Minister of Defense Shinjiro Koizumi, visiting a military base close to Taiwan, said plans to deploy missiles to the post would move forward as tensions smolder between Tokyo and Beijing.

“The deployment can help lower the chance of an armed attack on our country,” Koizumi told reporters on Sunday as he wrapped up his first trip to the base on the southern Japanese island of Yonaguni. “The view that it will heighten regional tensions is not accurate.”

Former Japanese minister of defense Gen Nakatani in January said that Tokyo wanted to base Type 03 Chu-SAM missiles on Yonaguni, but little progress has been made so far. The truck-launched missiles are designed to counter air threats up to 48km away.

Alliance condemns Beijing repression

Taipei Times

The Liberal International, a global alliance of liberal and progressive democratic political parties, yesterday unanimously passed a resolution proposed by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Fan Yun (范雲) to condemn China’s transnational repression against Taiwanese.

The motion was passed on the first day of the Liberal International’s 209th Executive Committee Meeting in The Hague, Netherlands.

Fan, who is the Liberal International’s vice president and attending on behalf of the DPP, proposed an emergency resolution to support DPP Legislator Puma Shen (沈伯洋) and counter transnational repression.

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