Taiwan was “not happy” with the unfair treatment it received at the Pacific Island Forum (PIF) held in the Polynesian island-state of Niue last week, where its delegation was forced to meet with representatives of six Pacific allies at a hotel rather than at the main venue, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said yesterday.
Radio Fiji reported that the Taiwanese delegation was “angry” because it was not afforded the same privileges as representatives from other countries at the Niue Forum Leaders Meeting.
The six allies — the Solomon Islands, Nauru, Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and Palau — issued a statement criticizing the forum’s organizers for forcing them to meet off site with the representatives of a country they recognize as sovereign, the report said.
MOFA Spokesman Henry Chen (陳銘政) yesterday said that Niue, being a small island, did not have a venue large enough to accommodate all the groups at the forum and therefore asked the Taiwanese delegation to hold its “16th Taiwan/Republic of China Forum-Countries Dialogue” at another hotel.
“We were not happy about being asked to hold our meeting away from the main venue, but we recognize that the treatment we received this year from the organizers and the PIF Secretariat Office was a significant improvement over previous years,” he said, adding that “angry” was too strong a word to describe Taiwan’s reaction to the arrangement.
At the meeting, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrew Hsia (夏立言), who headed the Taiwanese delegation, announced that Taiwan would donate US$406,000 to the forum next year for regional development projects.
A statement said the package included US$46,000 for the forum to replace “the official administration vehicle and purchase a luggage trailer which will be used for mail runs, banking, cargo collection [and] airport shuttle.”
Some of the money will help the forum fund a vocational training program for youth designed to increase employability through a community-based approach.
The heads of the six allies also reaffirmed their diplomatic ties in a joint statement with Taiwan and thanked Taiwan for its long-term support and generosity.
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
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
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