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Interior minister to serve as envoy to Pope's investiture

Minister of the Interior Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) will serve as President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) special envoy to the new Pope Benedict XVI's investiture, a senior Presidential Office official said last night.

Su will lead a delegation which will include two other official members: Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Quyang Jui-hsiung (歐陽瑞雄) and Taiwan's Ambassador to the Vatican Tou Chou-seng (杜筑生), Presidential Secretary-General Yu Shyi-kun said.

Yu said an invitation has been extended to the president from the Holy See to attend the new pontiff's investiture, which is slated to be held later this month. The president, however, can't make the trip himself because there are too many domestic affairs for him to attend to at this time, in addition to a planned overseas trip scheduled for the beginning of next month, the Presidential Secretary-General said.

Chen is slated to fly to the Marshall Islands on May 1 for a week-long trip that will also take him to Kiribati and Tuvalu. All three countries are allies of Taiwan.

When asked why the president didn't appoint a higher ranking government official such as Premier Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) as his envoy to the event, Yu said it was because Hsieh is also occupied with domestic affairs.

"Besides, we all know that the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) oversees the widest range of domestic issues in the nation -- it's the biggest ministry of all Cabinet-level government bodies," Yu said.

"The MOI oversees religious matters as well," he said.

medical appeal

Meanwhile, Chen yesterday said he had already instructed relevant government agencies to address the medical appeals by medical professionals the day before. Chen made the remarks while receiving a group of medical award recipients at the Presidential Office yesterday morning.

The remarks came as a response to the protest staged by medical professionals on Wednesday. To protest the proposed reduction of health insurance reimbursements -- ? which they said may result in the closure of local health facilities and threaten their livelihoods -- thousands of medical professionals from about 70 percent of clinics around the nation demonstrated in Taipei on Wednesday.

The protesters urged the government to revise national health insurance regulations and to abolish a regulation reducing reimbursement payments to local clinics.
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