Dozens of Taiwanese disaster relief and healthcare workers, representatives of charity groups and a medical team led by government officials yesterday left for Nepal, but Taiwan is still waiting for permits from Kathmandu to send search-and-rescue teams, authorities said.
A 37-member team from the Buddha’s Light International Association and physicians and nurses from Kaohsiung Chang Gung Memorial Hospital left in the morning, taking 5 tonnes of relief supplies, including blankets, tents, dried foods and medical supplies.
The team is scheduled to stay in Nepal for five days, International Headquarters Search and Rescue head Lu Cheng-tsung (呂正宗) said.
Photo: Yao Kai-shiou Taipei Times
Six medical personnel from the government-sponsored Taiwan International Health Action led by a Ministry of Health and Welfare official and accompanied by two Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials familiar with the situation in Nepal left in the afternoon.
Representative to India James Tien (田中光), who has been in Kathmandu since the earthquake on Saturday, would assist the relief workers if needed, foreign ministry spokesperson Anna Kao (高安) said.
Kathmandu has not yet accepted Taiwan’s offer to send official search-and-rescue teams.
Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrew Kao (高振群) on Monday said that Kathmandu has asked for search-and-rescue help only from neighbors such as China, India and Pakistan, and cited the great distance and the lack of direct flights and diplomatic relations for the handling of Taiwan’s offer.
Early yesterday at a regular news conference, Ministry of National Defense spokesperson David Lo (羅紹和) said the ministry has had everything ready to dispatch C-130 aircraft from Pingtung County to Nepal.
However, anonymous sources at the defense ministry said it would be more efficient to deliver aid via commercial flights than military aircraft because it would take the C-130s 11 to 14 hours to reach Nepal as they would have to fly over open ocean instead of crossing China’s airspace, the sources said.
The lack of diplomatic relations with most nations in the region would also create problems if they were to allow the aircraft through their airspace or grant them necessary refueling stops en route to Nepal, the sources added.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
MANAGING DIFFERENCES: In a meeting days after the US president signed a massive foreign aid bill, Antony Blinken raised concerns with the Chinese president about Taiwan US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and senior Chinese officials, stressing the importance of “responsibly managing” the differences between the US and China as the two sides butt heads over a number of contentious bilateral, regional and global issues, including Taiwan and the South China Sea. Talks between the two sides have increased over the past few months, even as differences have grown. Blinken said he raised concerns with Xi about Taiwan and the South China Sea, along with China’s support for Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, as well as other issues
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B