Taipei is working toward forging written guidelines with Washington for future bilateral relations now that ties have been institutionalized, Taiwan’s outgoing representative to the US said on Thursday.
Jason Yuan (袁健生) said the focus of his work over the past four years has been to deepen and institutionalize the substantial relations between Taiwan and the US.
Having accomplished that goal, Taiwan now hopes to put forward written guidelines for bilateral interaction, he said.
“There are various signs that relations between the two sides have entered a certain level and matured,” Yuan said upon his departure for Taiwan to take up his new position as secretary-general of the National Security Council.
The progress in bilateral relations is shown by the fact that homeland security officials were ready to meet with Taiwanese media following the announcement of Taiwan’s admission to the US Visa-Waiver Program, he said.
In addition, the US Department of Defense published a photo of a recent visit to the Pentagon by Taiwan’s Vice Defense Minister Andrew Yang (楊念祖), he said.
According to Yuan, exchanges between Taiwanese and US national security agencies have been institutionalized and no longer need to be kept confidential like they were in the 1980s.
He said that Taiwan plays an important role in the US’ strategy to expand its presence in Asia and that it would be “unrealistic” for Washington to continue to keep its contact with Taiwan secretive and under the table.
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