It has been revealed that renowned professor of acupuncture Lin Jaung-geng (林昭庚) would have become the first Taiwanese to attend an intergovernmental conference organized by UNESCO since Taiwan lost its UN seat in 1971 had host country Azerbaijan granted him a visa.
The reason Azerbaijan denied his visa request remains unclear.
According to sources, Lin wished to attend the Eighth Session of the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, from Dec. 2 to Dec. 8, as a representative of Taiwan, Taipei, However, the Azerbaijani government said that he be present at the meeting in an individual capacity.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed yesterday that Azerbaijan had refused to give Lin an official letter of invitation needed to apply for a visa to the country, without the reasons being disclosed.
After the request by the ministry via its overseas mission in Russia to the Azerbaijani embassy in Moscow was rejected, the ministry turned to UNESCO headquarters in Paris for help, but to no avail, a ministry official said.
UNESCO gave no explanation to the ministry for its failure to secure a letter of invitation for Lin from Azerbaijan, the official said.
If it was the case that Lin insisted on being present under the name Taiwan, Taipei, UNESCO might rather not have him attend the conference because, as a UN-affiliated agency, it would not agree to invite a representative from Taiwan to its events, another ministry official said.
Azerbaijan’s visa policy might have been another reason, another official at the ministry said.
Like some other former Soviet countries, Azerbaijan has had a policy of being strict in issuing visas to Republic of China (ROC) passport holders due to past links with the People’s Republic of China, the official said.
Lin said yesterday that UNESCO invited him in September, on the World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies’ recommendation, to attend the conference as an academic expert without borders.
The travel agency that handled his visa application told him that he needed a passport issued by a country other than the ROC to apply for a visa, Lin said.
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