英倫翻譯社/ Trsmaster

Arash of audacious attacks on mosques, Muslim cemeteries and Israeli military bases have trained a light on the rising threat of Jewish extremists _ and the country's long history of failing to rein them in.

Over the past two years, few extremists have been arrested and fewer still prosecuted in dozens of assaults. This week alone, extremists were blamed for a pair of mosque burnings as well as an attack on a West Bank military base that injured a top Israeli commander.

The violence has prompted rare attention from Israeli leaders, who have begun to call the perpetrators "terrorists" _ a term usually reserved for Palestinian militants.

"Israel must not be overrun by a group of people who represent a grave danger to its essence and existence," President Shimon Peres, a Nobel peace laureate, said Thursday after meeting with mainstream West Bank settler leaders.

"We won't let them attack our soldiers. We won't let them ignite a religious war with our neighbors. We won't let them desecrate mosques. We won't let them harm Jews or Arabs," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told a meeting of his Likud Party late Thursday.

Moderate parliamentary opposition leader Tzipi Livni this week said the extremists were pushing Israel to the edge of civil war.

Critics say the violence is the result of authorities' long-standing policy of treating Jewish extremists, usually connected to religious elements in the settler movement, with kid gloves. Instead they have tended to focus on thwarting attacks by Palestinian militants.

"The tendency of the military and the police is to see their own role as protecting the settlers, the Israeli citizens, from the Palestinians, rather than to fulfill their proper role, which is being responsible for keeping order and public safety in territories under military authority," said Gershom Gorenberg, an author who has written extensively about the settler movement.

Hard-line settlers believe Israel has a God-given right to the West Bank and east Jerusalem, territories Israel captured in 1967, and reject Palestinian claims to those lands.

The attacks on mosques and other Palestinian targets are known by the label the extremists coined, "price tag" _ suggesting they are retribution for government operations like dismantling illegally built settlement structures.

Taipei, Dec. 16 (CNA) A ruling Kuomintang legislator asked the Control Yuan Friday to look into whether opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen was involved in profiteering during her stint as vice premier in the previous DPP administration. Chiu Yi visited the watchdog body in charge of monitoring government operations and officials' behavior to push for a probe into Tsai's role in the government's investment in the biotech startup TaiMed Biologics in 2007. Chiu, an outspoken critic of the DPP, which was in power 2000-2008, also asked Control Yuan member Yeh Yao-peng to simultaneously investigate whether two other former officials were involved in the National Development Fund's (NDF's) investment in TaiMed, of which Tsai served as chairwoman for several months after she stepped down from the vice premiership in May 2007. The lawmaker was referring to Ho Mei-yueh, a former minister of the Council for Economic Planning and Development, which oversees NDF operations, and Ho Chun-hui, a former NDF deputy executive secretary. Chiu demanded that the Control Yuan get to the bottom of whether the three former officials abused their power or used unethical methods for personal gain during their service in the DPP administration. Chiu and his KMT colleagues suspect that Tsai might have manipulated the NDF investment in TaiMed during her tenure as vice premier to pave the way for her takeover of the venture's chairmanship after leaving the Cabinet post. According to the KMT lawmakers, Tsai is in violation of the "revolving door" regulation that bans government officials from working for the businesses under their supervision within three years of retiring from the public sector. (By Emmanuelle Tzeng and Sofia Wu)

Syrian army defectors killed 27 members of President Bashar al-Assad’s security forces in an attack Thursday, the S yrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The attack in the southern governorate of Daraa, where the nine-month uprising against Assad began, came after eight S yrian soldiers died in an ambush by deserters near Hama.

S yria’s repression of protests has led to defections from the army and an escalation of clashes in which both sides are armed.

“The statements of soldiers and officers who defected from the S yrian military and intelligence agencies leave no doubt that the abuses were committed in pursuance of state policy and that they were directly ordered, authorized or condoned at the highest levels of S yrian military and civilian leadership,” New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a report published Thursday.

The United Nations estimates the number of civilians and army defectors killed exceeds 5,000. The government says more than 1,100 members of the security forces have been killed.

Taipei, Dec. 16 (CNA) Taiwan and New Zealand will soon begin a joint feasibility study into a bilateral economic cooperation agreement (ECA), Executive Yuan spokesman Philip Yang said Friday. According to Yang, New Zealand is the first non-ASEAN country to agree to explore the feasibility of an ECA with Taiwan. The two sides have recently completed separate studies into the issue, which concluded that signing the ECA will help boost their trade and investment ties. He said the latest progress signifies that the government's strategy of attaching equal importance to cross-Taiwan Strait peace and Taiwan's global presence has produced results. The government will continue to work to negotiate economic agreements with other trade partners in the future, he said. (By Angela Tsai and Y.F. Low)

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – The three presidential rivals were preparing their final live televised debate to be broadcast Saturday, reports said.

Kuomintang candidate President Ma Ying-jeou, Democratic Progressive Party Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen and People First Party Chairman James Soong first met each other at a similar debate on December 3. One week later, their running mates confronted each other.

The final debate before polling day on January 14 will follow a different formula, with representatives of 12 different social action groups putting questions about their own specialist subjects to the three candidates. The topics will range from health reform, agriculture and education to women’s rights, taxation and labor rights.

One of the people chosen to ask a question is Yang Ju-men, a man once known as the ‘rice bomber.’ After Taiwan joined the World Trade Organization in 2002, he planted 17 bombs in parks, restrooms and telephone booths around Taipei. Only two exploded, and nobody was injured. Yang was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison but was released after only two years.

On the side of the candidates, DPP campaign officials reportedly feared for Tsai’s performance because she had a cold and found it difficult to speak, reports said Friday. She was already hoarse when she participated in a discussion about her cultural policies on Thursday afternoon, and her speech grew increasingly difficult at a rally in a park later that evening, aides said.

She was present at a first rehearsal with campaign staff at the DPP headquarters, but didn’t speak in order to save her voice for Saturday, reports said.

Aides said most of the questions at the debate would be targeted at Ma because he represented the government. Tsai would try to join in the criticism of the president, they said.

Ma was rehearsing the debate on Friday morning, but aides estimated that preparing was hard because it was difficult to tell which kind of questions the activists would ask.

The Ma campaign expected that both Tsai and Soong would band together and launch fiercer attacks than before on the president, turning the debate into a two-against-one affair. Soong had been described as the outsider after the first debate, which meant he would likely change his strategy and be tougher on Ma, reports quoted presidential campaign staff as saying.

The PFP chairman had no public events planned for Friday because he wanted to study the social groups asking questions at the debate, reports said.