The government will fight for the country’s right to participate in the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) on an equal footing with other member states, despite the downgrading of Taiwan’s membership status, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Phoebe Yeh (葉非比) said yesterday.
Yeh said Taiwan, as a member of the OIE, has the right to take part in OIE affairs and activities and will send a delegation to attend the General Session of the OIE’s International Committee taking place from Sunday to Friday in Paris.
Yeh dismissed the OIE’s decision to downgrade Taiwan’s membership status to the level of a “non-sovereign regional member” as illegitimate, adding there was no such category in the OIE charter.
Under pressure from China, members of the Paris-based OIE voted in May last year in favor of a resolution asking Taiwan to continue its participation in the OIE as a “non-sovereign regional member” under the title “Chinese Taipei.”
Taiwan gained accession to the OIE in 1954 under the name, “Republic of China (Taiwan),” but was forced to change its title to “Taipei China” after Beijing was admitted to the organization in 1992.
In an attempt to push the OIE to make further concessions on Taiwan’s title, China refused to participate in OIE activities.
To try to resolve the problem, the OIE International Committee adopted a resolution in 2003 to change Taiwan’s membership name from “Taipei China” to “Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu.”
Taiwan agreed to the new designation, but China refused to take part in the final vote on the issue.
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