Sergey Gubarev, Russia’s envoy to Taiwan, was conferred a diplomatic medal yesterday in recognition of his contributions to promoting relations between Taiwan and Russia.
Gubarev, the representative of the Moscow-Taipei Coordination Commission on Economic and Cultural Cooperation in Taipei, is scheduled to leave Taiwan on Nov. 7 after serving four years as the de facto Russian ambassador to Taiwan in the absence of formal diplomatic relations.
“During his four-year tenure, Representative Gubarev has done an excellent job of expanding Russia-Taiwan exchanges in such areas as the economy and trade, technology, arts and culture,” Minister of Foreign Affairs Timothy Yang (楊進添) said at the ceremony to confer Gubarev the Friendship Medal of Diplomacy. “His dedication to this task has won him many friends from all walks of society in Taiwan, and especially from the ministry.”
Describing Gubarev as an outstanding diplomat with a wealth of experience, Yang said he promoted various projects beneficial to bilateral relations.
They included arranging a visit to Taiwan last year by a delegation led by Anatoly Chubais, Russia’s former first prime minister and chief executive of the state-run nanotechnology company Rusnano, and a trip to Russia by Taiwan’s vice minister of economic affairs to attend the first International Forum on Nanotechnologies, also last year.
“The best side of [my] Taiwanese life was the Taiwanese people, who are very friendly, cooperative and open,” Gubarev said.
He said he found the diplomatic medal precious because he received it from people he loves.
“Thanks to the attitude of the Taiwanese people, the four years that I spent here in Taiwan [were] like one day for me,” he said.
As to promoting direct flights between Taipei and Moscow, Gubarev said the main obstacles lie with the airlines rather than the governments.
The Moscow office said Vasily Dobrovolsky, the new Russian representative to Taiwan, is scheduled to arrive on Nov. 16.
Dobrovolsky was a senior officer at the APEC and has previously served in Japan.
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