Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide arrived in Taipei yesterday for his first visit to Taiwan since his re-election in 2000.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Eugene Chien (簡又新) and Haitian Ambassador to Taiwan Lafontaine Saint-Louis greeted Aristide at Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, Taiwan's main gateway located some 40km south of Taipei.
President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) will preside over a welcoming ceremony today at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall complex in downtown Taipei in honor of Aristide. During the ceremony the Haitian head of state will be accorded full military honors, complete with a 21-gun salute.
During his five-day state visit, Aristide will hold two rounds of talks with President Chen on matters of mutual concern and meet with Premier Yu Shyi-kun and other senior Taiwan officials to discuss ways to promote bilateral cooperation. He will also visit major industrial, agricultural and cultural institutions, including an experimental farm in Taoyuan and a vocational training center in Taichung.
This afternoon, Aristide and his 40-member entourage will visit the Jiji Junior High School and the Jiji Train Station in Nantou County which were both devastated by the Sept. 21 earthquake in 1999, in the company of President Chen and his wife. They will then visit the Lugang Folk Arts Museum in Changhwa County, Central Taiwan.
On the evening of that day, Chen will host a state banquet in honor of President Aristide and his entourage at the Li-de Cultural and Educational Recreational Center in Lugang.
Aristide will sign a joint communique with President Chen before ending his visit Saturday.
Premier Yu was to host a dinner in honor of President Aristide last night, during which the Haitian president was to confer a decoration upon Yu in recognition of his contributions to improving the friendship ties between the two countries.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching