The Ministry of Foreign Affairs protested yesterday over Japan’s approval of school textbooks that list the disputed Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) as part of Japan’s territory.
The unilateral move by Japan is unhelpful to the maintenance of regional stability and does not change the fact that the Republic of China (ROC) holds sovereignty over the islands, ministry spokesperson Anna Kao (高安) said.
The ROC government will lodge a serious protest with Japan over the issue through diplomatic channels, she added.
She urged the parties involved to respond to President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) East China Sea peace initiative, which calls for all parties to shelve their differences and seek cooperation on resource development in the region through dialogue.
According to Japan’s Asahi Shimbun daily, all social studies textbooks approved for use in Japanese elementary schools from April next year will mention the Senkakus — as the Diaoyutais are known in Japan — based on the results of a Japanese Ministry of Education textbook screening announced that day.
Seven of the 14 textbooks submitted for screening clearly state that the Senkakus are “inherent territories of Japan,” the newspaper said.
The Diaoyutais, about 120 nautical miles (220km) northeast of Taipei, are claimed by Japan, Taiwan and China, which calls them the Diaoyu Islands.
The textbooks also lay claim to the Takeshima island chain, called the Dokdo by South Korea, which is at the center of a territorial dispute between Tokyo and Seoul.
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
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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