Former US senator Bob Dole was lobbying for Taiwan during a six-month period that ended in April, recently released documents show.
He contacted at least eight Washington officials on Taipei’s behalf and the law and lobbying firm he represents — Alston & Bird — was paid a total of US$120,000.
Lobbying documents made public this week by the non-profit Sunlight Foundation show that Taipei was particularly interested in developing relations with the US presidential campaign of Republican Mitt Romney.
Dole, the 1996 Republican presidential nominee, wrote separate letters to Romney advisers Dov Zakheim, Mitchell Reiss, Eric Edelman, Alex Wong and Kerry Healey.
The letters were aimed primarily at persuading the advisers to meet with Representative to the US Jason Yuan (袁健生).
In addition, the 88-year-old Dole wrote to Hogan Gidley, an adviser to former US senator Rick Santorum, and CIA Director David Petraeus requesting that they meet with Yuan.
During the same period, Dole also contacted US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton asking her to negotiate a new diplomatic immunity agreement with Taipei and White House official Valerie Jarrett to request presidential support for the Dragon Boat Festival.
The letter to Gidley was a curious development because it was written two weeks after Santorum had dropped out of the Republican presidential nominee race.
He was the second Taiwan lobbyist in Washington to make the news recently.
Last month, US Representative Bill Owens ordered his staff to undergo special ethics training in the aftermath of a controversial trip to Taiwan that he and his wife took late last year.
Owens paid back the US$22,000 cost of the trip to the Taipei-based Chinese Culture University, which was supposed to organize the trip “to promote international cultural exchange.”
It has been alleged in the US that the trip was actually organized by Park Strategies, a lobbying company employed by the Taiwanese government.
Park Strategies was paid US$250,000 for lobbying services by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Washington last year.
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