US Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman will arrive on a three-day visit to Taipei on Monday, the highest-ranking US government official to visit Taiwan since 2000, the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) said yesterday.
Poneman outranks US Agency for International Development Administrator Rajiv Shah, who was in Taipei for two days last week, the AIT said.
During his visit, Poneman will meet President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), senior government officials and US and Taiwan business leaders. He will also deliver a speech on how the US and Taiwan can work together to tackle tomorrow’s energy challenges, the AIT said.
Poneman will promote greater cooperation between the public and private sectors in Taiwan and the US in a number of fields, including scientific research, nuclear energy and renewable energy technologies, the AIT said.
Shah visited Taiwan after attending the 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, while Poneman’s visit was also part of an Asia trip.
The last visit to Taiwan made by a secretary-level official in a US administration was in 2000 when then-US secretary of transportation Rodney Slater attended a Taiwan-US business conference.
In response to the announcement, Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Department of North American Affairs Director-General Bruce Linghu (令狐榮達) said Taiwan welcomed all visits by senior US officials.
“Following the visit by Shah, the upcoming visit by Poneman will be another demonstration of the US’ commitment to send senior officials to enhance bilateral cooperative relationships, which has an important bearing on high-level exchanges between Taiwan and the US,” Linghu said.
AIT spokesperson Christopher Kavanagh said the US encouraged high-level visits and hoped Poneman’s visit would be as productive as that of Shah, who discussed a number of ways to enhance cooperation in foreign assistance with government officials and leaders from the private sector.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS