The Republic of China government has expressed condolences upon the death of Saudi Arabia's ruler, King Fahd, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said yesterday.
MOFA spokesman Michel Lu said the government directed ROC Representative to Saudi Arabia Yang Sheng-chung to convey its condolences to the Saudi authorities earlier in the day.
Fahd died early yesterday at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. His brother, Crown Prince Abdullah, has been appointed the country's new monarch.
Lu said the ROC government looks forward to the continued strengthening of relations between Taiwan and Saudi Arabia under the new Saudi monarch.
"It is hoped that King Abdullah will continue to beef up the friendly relations between Taiwan and Saudi Arabia," Lu said.
Despite the absence of formal diplomatic ties, Saudi Arabia is a major crude oil supplier to Taiwan.
EUROPEAN TARGETS: The planned Munich center would support TSMC’s European customers to design high-performance, energy-efficient chips, an executive said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday said that it plans to launch a new research-and-development (R&D) center in Munich, Germany, next quarter to assist customers with chip design. TSMC Europe president Paul de Bot made the announcement during a technology symposium in Amsterdam on Tuesday, the chipmaker said. The new Munich center would be the firm’s first chip designing center in Europe, it said. The chipmaker has set up a major R&D center at its base of operations in Hsinchu and plans to create a new one in the US to provide services for major US customers,
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday said that it would redesign the written portion of the driver’s license exam to make it more rigorous. “We hope that the exam can assess drivers’ understanding of traffic rules, particularly those who take the driver’s license test for the first time. In the past, drivers only needed to cram a book of test questions to pass the written exam,” Minister of Transportation and Communications Chen Shih-kai (陳世凱) told a news conference at the Taoyuan Motor Vehicle Office. “In the future, they would not be able to pass the test unless they study traffic regulations
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