The nation's top representative to the US said on Tuesday that there has not been much concrete progress on the signing of a Taiwan-US free trade agreement, but some US lawmakers have been soliciting signatures to promote such an agreement.
Chen Chien-jen (
He said the US Trade Repre-sentative Office still has concerns on several issues, including intellectual property rights (IPR) infringements, rice imports, the opening of the telecommunications market, as well as the examination and pricing of pharmaceuticals, which he said will have to await further communication and coordination between the two sides.
It has been reported that Washington thinks that Taiwan is not doing enough in carrying out its commitments more than one year after its WTO admission, especially on the issues of rice imports and IPR protection, leading the US side to delay talks under the framework of a Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA) signed in 1994.
Chen said that Taiwan has continued to provide the latest information to the US in the hopes that it will understand the country's efforts on these issues.
He said that after the differences between the two sides over the four major trade issues are cleared up, they can then resume TIFA talks during which initial discussions on a free-trade agreement can be initiated.
Then, he continued, the two sides can enter into the next stage of negotiating the signing of a free trade agreement.
He said the two sides should be able to resolve their differences on such issues as IPR protection in the same way they did in bilateral talks over exchange rates or turkey meat imports.
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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