TAIPEI: Taiwan will strengthen its defense efforts and safeguard the island’s security in the year ahead, President Lai Ching-te said in his Lunar New Year message released on Sunday.
Lai last year proposed $40 billion in extra defense spending to counter China, which views the island as its own territory. But the opposition, which has a majority in parliament, has refused to review the proposal and instead advanced its own, less expensive proposals, which only fund the purchase of some of the US weapons Lai wants.
In his address, recorded at one of Taiwan’s most important military radar stations in the central mountain range which he visited earlier this month, Lai said he wanted to thank the armed forces for protecting Taiwan around the clock.
“We will continue to strengthen our national defense and public security efforts, safeguarding national security and maintaining social stability,” he said in the message carried on his social media accounts.
The message showed Lai at the high-altitude Hsiaohsuehshan radar station, chatting with officers there.
The video also featured footage of Taiwan’s first domestically developed submarine, which is in the process of undersea trials.
Lai, who Beijing denounces as a “separatist” given his rejection of the country’s sovereignty claims, did not extend greetings to China, which staged its latest round of major war games around the island in late December.
China has never renounced the use of force to bring Taiwan under its control.
China, as well as South Korea and large parts of Southeast Asia, also mark the Lunar New Year holiday.
Taiwan president vows to strengthen island’s defenses in Lunar New Year message
https://arab.news/z5e5v
Taiwan president vows to strengthen island’s defenses in Lunar New Year message
- Lai last year proposed $40 billion in extra defense spending to counter China, which views the island as its own territory
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
