Welcome to a first trial test of the dot TW report

Now today originally we were going to record Current Affairs Taiwan, but Michael Turtin couldn't make it today

And so I thought I'd test this out and give it a run now if this works out

Well the idea is to do about a ten minute or so report a few times a week

Now it will be a little bit different than say an ICRT report

Which of course covers all the news in a very quick format. This is focused entirely on politics and foreign affairs

Things like that, and it's a little bit more about why certain things

jumped out or are important so the idea is to give a little bit of context and a little bit of

So you can get a little bit more of a sense of what goes into

Our thinking when we do current affairs Taiwan on Sunday evenings, I'm sorry Monday

Now all of this content you can follow on our website

tiled the Taiwan report website which is report dot

TW (Report.tw) so, you can check it out

You can check out all these articles you can

Double check and you know follow up and get a little bit more depth than content if you like

Alright, so I'm gonna start with some of the sillier news from today

The this is a Taiwan News report, which I pulled some there's actually a longer more in-depth

CNA one that came out later

But I went with the Taiwan news one because they tend to be the fastest and they were in this case

Now the this is a Chinese promoters

There's a YouTube video video put up by Potter King

now this is pretty funny because he got Tsai Ing-wen to show up there at their studio and

he decided to flirt with the

President Tsai Ing-wen so the video was titled first person in the world

to flirt with a president that was posted up on Saturday and

It was I saw little bits of it on on the TV news and it looked like it was funny and kind of cute

Tsai kind of dealt with it very well. You know, she bantered with them and it was a little bit of fun

however

China which has

providing them with some funding

Company in China Chinese promoter I should say

asked them to delete the video because it said

They use the term president

Now Potter King has said there's absolutely no way that they will do so and they will not

They will basically the money isn't that important to them

So let's move on

All right, this is the love Ferris wheel now if you remember if you remember going way back

During the campaign for Kaohsiung mayor Han Kuo-yu came up with several ideas

some of which were not

Exactly realistic this one however, technically probably could happen

now the idea was is that there would be a very large ferris wheel looking over the Love River and

But instead of just like a little normal like your normal ferris wheel

Each of the carriages would essentially be a like a little love motel room. So

That people could be like a little hotel

And then there would be a shopping complex. Now. It turned out that they didn't really have a good site for this

near the Love River but what they did have is some other areas around however as

the Taipei Times reported not a single investor has expressed an interest in

Developing the old port zone at the port of Kaohsiung

one of the locations considered by the Kaohsiung city government to implement its love ferris wheel and

shopping mall project

Now

the

The mayor then went on and blamed them

So the sorry, let's see here the city accused of not cooperating

This is the ports company in implementing the project and threatened to raise the percentage of funds

It would receive from the development of pier 21 from 42 to 50 percent, you know in order to put the screws on

No, that's not the only person that Mayor Han Kuo-yu blamed he also blamed Lin Chia-lung

saying that and then here's some headlines from local Chinese language sources our

transportation Bureau blocking love Motel ferris wheel Lin Chia-lung spits back

excuse and in Fount media because of the

quote love motel ferris wheel hand slams

Transportation Bureau Lin Chia-lung Don't pass the buck to others because political promised check

bounced

Alright there's some polling, you know, which I didn't see in the English press so I put together something here for you on

Report.TW

local Taiwan media poll shows Su Tseng-chang's

Cabinet hits new highs and Langella long sweeps the top spots

So according to a Taiwan Brain Trust Poll

the executive UN cabinet headed by Su Tseng-chang has hit a new high in popularity with

48.7% expressing satisfaction and

35.5%

dissatisfied now of his various ministers Lin Chia-lung and his Ministry of Transportation

Came out tops in all three categories polled public visibility

45.7 so people know who he is their satisfaction with him at forty nine point three and Ministry of Transportation

That's his department. The satisfaction was fourteen point seven, which put it ahead of every other of

Every other one mostly people don't really know what they think of most of these

ministries or the details

All right, here's a quick one, I'm gonna go over Focus Taiwan

Taiwan US companies to ink pact on f-16 maintenance center

alright, so this is important because

Now this is here. Let's take a look at this Taiwan's state-owned Aerospace Industrial Development Corp

AIDC and US defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp are to sign a strategic partnership agreement

Tuesday to promote the establishment of an F-16 fighter jet maintenance center in Taiwan according to AIDC

No this may I'm not a defense analyst so I'm not really sure but this seems to me like this would be a good way

both to get engineers in Taiwan AIDC up to speed on

certain parts maintenance

And so on and so forth on

F-16 but in fighter jets in general this also may be a way that the US

May be helping to funnel some technology to a AIDC. Now AIDC is developing

They're the ones who did the previous

the indigenous fighters and

They are working right now on building a new set of trainer jets

For the Taiwan Air Force now, I don't know for sure if there's gonna be any technology transfer, but it's definitely a possibility

and of course because you know the United States would get a lot of objections from China if they openly did a

Technology transfer this may be a very subtle way of going about it

now, it's going to be set up in the Shalu District of

Taichung there's another remote possibility that comes from this and that is that if there's an emergency with an F-16

the

U.S. F-16 and they're in the area they could land at Taichung CCK Airport Air Force Base and then

This would be just nearby

So, all right. Those are just a few that I've picked out for today. I've got some more coming tomorrow, which I'll go over

But very quickly before I go take a look

the the report is linked to here on our site the

the Committee to Protect

Journalists has come out with a very long report

Called one country one sensor how China undermines media freedom in Hong Kong and Taiwan

Take a look at it. I may go into it a little bit tomorrow

but for

Now you have access to the whole thing

But just very quickly here take a look at some of the things here Taiwan faces a dilemma

how does it maintain its openness and press freedom while facing an adversary that has vast resources and

Technological prowess and lacks the values that have made Taiwan a democracy

based on CPG reporting Taiwan does not have a clear answer as

This report documents China's influence over local local legacy and social media has grown

That influence has become potentially more worrisome as general elections on January 11th, 2020 approach

Reflecting fears that China is intervening surreptitiously

To sway the outcome

Now facing potential threats Taiwan has employed a patchwork of legal and regulatory

Approaches to punish media for inaccurate reporting or distortions while experimenting with other methods of fighting lies with truth

Anyway, the report goes into considerable depth talks a lot about the Want Want Group and so on and so forth

But I think I'm gonna leave it there. We've hit the ten-minute mark, so hopefully you'll get more of these in future