Minister of Foreign Affairs Francisco Ou (歐鴻鍊) will sign a bilateral cooperation agreement with his Belize counterpart when he accompanies President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) on a visit to the Central American country tomorrow, a foreign ministry official said yesterday.
Ou is part of a delegation headed by Ma that left yesterday on a nine-day visit to three of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies in Central America — Belize, Guatemala and El Salvador.
Weber Shih (施文斌), director-general of the Department of Economic and Trade Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that Ou and his Belizean counterpart, Wilfred Elrington, would sign an agreement for cooperation in the field of information communication technology (ICT).
Under the planned agreement, the two countries will work together to develop long-term bilateral links in the ICT sector and will concentrate their efforts on areas such as electronic government, e-commerce and e-industry, as well as ICT-related education and training, Shih said.
Shih said the International Cooperation and Development Fund (ICDF) last year assisted Belize in establishing portal sites for its central government and ministry of foreign affairs and helped Belize’s ministry of economic affairs to build two data bank systems. The Belize National ICT Center, which is being built with assistance from Taiwan, will be inaugurated at the end of this year, he said.
Aside from the projects it is implementing in Belize, the ICDF has been working since 2006 to develop ICT cooperation projects in St Kitts and Nevis, St Vincent and the Grenadines and St Lucia — three of Taiwan’s Caribbean allies.
The efforts have borne fruit, as St Lucia now has an electronic databank of automobile drivers, vehicles and driving licenses, which has improved government efficiency and the country’s capacity to crack down on crime, Shih said.
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