Today’s Double Ten National Day festivities to celebrate the 100th year of the Republic of China will be attended by the most foreign visitors in a decade, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Saturday.
About 50 delegations composed of up to 1,500 members are expected to attend the festivities, the ministry said.
The delegations include more than 15 high-level government groups from the nation’s diplomatic allies, including four presidents, three vice presidents, one prime minister and three legislative speakers.
Burkina Faso President Blaise Compaore, Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom Caballeros, Nauru President Marcus Stephen and Palau President Johnson Toribiong are to attend the celebrations, the ministry said.
Some countries without formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan are also sending delegations, which makes the celebration more meaningful, the ministry said.
The guest list includes Valdas Adamkus, former president of the Republic of Lithuania, as well as former US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus.
Lawmakers from the European Parliament also issued a letter to President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to show their support for an economic cooperation agreement between Taiwan and Europe.
They also backed the country’s participation in international organizations, such as the WHO, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the International Civil Aviation Organization.
Taiwanese expatriates will also be arriving in Taiwan in large numbers for the bash. The Overseas Compatriot Affairs Commission said more than 20,000 overseas Taiwanese — the most in 20 years — would return for the country’s big day.
Overseas Compatriot Affairs Commission Minister Wu Ying-yi (吳英毅) said as of Friday, 12,299 Taiwanese had returned.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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