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‘The president feels the distress of the flood victims in centraland southern Taiwan and decides to cancel his plan to take part inthe dragon boat race on Saturday,’ said presidential spokesmanWang Yu-chi in a statement.
Ma’s plan to take part in the annual Dragon Boat Festival racesdispleased both ruling and opposition lawmakers, who felt theisland’s leader should visit the inundated areas in central andsouthern Taiwan.
Ruling Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT) lawmaker LeeChia-chun said Ma should go to southern Taiwan to inspect theinundated areas as ‘people there would feel better.’
Opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers Fridaylashed out at Ma for wasting taxpayers’ money in deploying up to 200security agents to protect him in the fun race on Saturday.
‘If the expenditure cost in safeguarding him could be used to aidthe flood victims, all the farmers would be thankful to him,’ saidDPP lawmaker Chen Ting-fei in a parliament session.
Torrential rains in the past three days have created seriousflooding in central and southern Taiwan. Many low-lying areas,including those in Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second largest city, reportedflooding up to one metre deep.
Agriculture authorities have reported more than 20 million Taiwandollars (662,251 US) in lost farm produce so far. Earlier onFriday rescuers had to evacuate some 70 households in a mountainvillage in the southern county of Pingtung due to a rockslide.
Ma has taken part in the race almost every year while he served asTaipei mayor between 1998 and 2006.

monstersandcritics.com

Tiny bodies everywhere: single child policy compounds the grief
THE bodies are everywhere. Some are zipped inside white vinyl bags and strewn on the ground. Others have been covered in a favourite blanket or dressed in new clothes. There are so many bodies that undertakers want to cremate them in groups. They were all children.
“Our grief is incomparable,” said Li Ping, 39, as he and his wife carefully pulled a pair of pink pyjamas over the bruised, naked body of their eight-year-old daughter, Ke. “We got married late, and had a child late. She is our only child.”
The earthquake that struck Sichuan province on Monday claimed tens of thousands of lives across China. But the awful scene at this morgue is a sad reminder that too many of the dead are children in a country where most families can have only one.
These children symbolised the earthquake’s seemingly indiscriminate cruelty. But the cruelty, in the eyes of their parents, was also man-made.
Several schools in nearby Dujiangyan collapsed while classes were under way. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao made emotional visits to two of them, including Xinjian Primary School, where parents say officials told him the death toll was 20 pupils.
But enraged parents at the morgue say officials lied to the prime minister to hide the true toll at Xinjian, which they estimate at more than 400 dead children.
Several parents blamed local officials for a slow initial rescue response and questioned the structural safety of the school building. They also were furious that officials forbade them to search for their children for two days and were then allowed access to the bodies only after they formed an ad hoc committee to complain about their treatment.
“Before Wen Jiabao came, the whole school was filled with children’s bodies,” said one mother who sat outdoors at the morgue with her husband in the early morning darkness beside the covered body of their eight-year-old daughter.

news.scotsman.com