The emergency response task force set up by the government to handle the Olympics will not handle political issues in Beijing, which will be dealt with in Taipei, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said yesterday.
Council Vice Chairman Chang Liang-jen (張良任) told a press conference that a task force in Taipei would take care of any political issues or other matters that task force members sent to Beijing could not handle.
Task force members sent to Beijing would deal with matters only concerning sports activities and any related conflicts, he said.
While Minister without Portfolio Ovid Tseng (曾志朗) will lead the task force to Beijing, Chang will preside over the team in Taipei.
The task force includes members from the MAC, the Sports Affairs Council, the Straits Exchange Foundation, the Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee, the National Communications Council and the National Security Council.
Liu said the task force was on standby and that he believed that any issues regarding Beijing denigrating Taiwan’s sovereignty at the Games would be “properly dealt with.”
“As our principle when dealing with Beijing over the years has been to uphold equality and reciprocation, we will not allow our sovereignty to be depreciated at the Beijing Games,” he said. “I believe they [China] will not engage in any petty maneuvers because they want to see a successful Olympics.”
In related news, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄), who met with Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) in May, said yesterday he had no plans for a second meeting with Hu during his trip to China for the Olympics.
“I am attending the Olympic opening ceremony as a guest with no other plans,” Wu said during an interview with Radio Taiwan International. “However, I promise to express clearly the Taiwanese people’s voice and their expectations for safety, dignity and international space.”
Wu brushed off the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) condemnation of the government’s acceptance of Taiwan’s title at the Olympic Games and the arrangements for the opening ceremony.
“Chinese media called our team ‘Taipei, China’ during the last two Olympics. Thanks to the KMT government’s efforts, they are now referring to us as ‘Chinese Taipei,’” he said.
Meanwhile, Deputy Kaohsiung Mayor Chiu Tai-san (邱太三) of the DPP yesterday dismissed media speculation that he had received an invitation from Beijing to attend the opening ceremony of the Games as a VIP guest.
Chiu said that neither he nor Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) had received an offer from China to attend the opening ceremony. Chiu said if he were to attend, he would participate as a board member of the Kaohsiung Organizing Committee (KOC) of the 2009 World Games, which the city is hosting next year.
Chiu made the denial in response to a report in the Chinese-language United Daily News yesterday that said Chiu, KOC chief executive officer Hsu Chao-chuan (�?�) and former National Security Council deputy secretary-general Liu Shih-fang (劉世芳), who served as a KOC board member, had been invited by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office to the opening ceremony.
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