A Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) official will lodge a protest in person against the WHO on Tuesday for labeling Taiwan a province of China in recent correspondence, Minister of Foreign Affairs Francisco Ou (歐鴻鍊) said yesterday.
“We absolutely cannot accept the term ‘Taiwan, China.’ We have already lodged a written protest to the WHO and our representative to Geneva will confront the WHO in person on the 30th,” Ou said at the Legislative Yuan.
Ou said Taiwan will demand that the WHO contact Taiwan directly on any health-related news or when replying to enquiries.
The Department of Health (DOH) last week notified the WHO that Taiwan had exported a batch of dairy products to Hong Kong that may have been made with toxic milk powder from China.
The WHO, in its reply, referred to Taiwan as “Taiwan, China,” and instead of addressing the DOH as the sole recipient of the reply, the health watchdog sent the official response to China and only sent a copy to Taiwan.
The move has sparked anger in Taiwan. Politicians across party lines are urging the government to confront the WHO to set the record straight.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator and former foreign minister John Chiang (蔣孝嚴) named WHO Director-General Margaret Chan (陳馮富珍) of Hong Kong as the major stumbling block behind Taiwan’s continual exclusion.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) panned the “deliberate error” as evidence that the so-called “diplomatic truce” initiated by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) with Beijing has not been reciprocated and that the administration was giving its sovereignty away on a silver platter.
“Taiwan, in all good faith, reported its possible export of tainted products to China to the WHO,” DPP legislator Tsai Huang-lang (蔡煌瑯) said, “but our sincerity was reciprocated with stoneheartedness.”
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