President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has appointed seven ambassadors-at-large from a variety of backgrounds to help promote diplomacy, the Presidential Office said on Tuesday.
They are all outstanding figures in areas such as environmental sustainability, public health, digital opportunities, the empowerment of women, sports and culture, Presidential Office spokesman Sidney Lin (林鶴明) said.
It is hoped that the ambassadors-at-large would contribute their expertise in the fields to help promote the nation’s diplomacy, Lin said.
A notice on the Web site of the Presidential Office said that the ambassadors-at-large are former Centers for Disease Control director-general Steve Kuo (郭旭崧); former minister of foreign affairs Eugene Chien (簡又新), who is chairman of the Taiwan Institute for Sustainable Energy; former Environmental Protection Administration minister Winston Dang (陳重信); Chen Jen-ran (陳正然), an independent director on Chunghwa Telecom’s board of directors; PChome Online chairman Jan Hung-tze (詹宏志); Fan Yun (范雲), an associate professor at National Taiwan University’s Department of Sociology; and track and field Olympic medalist Chi Cheng (紀政), who also serves as a national policy adviser to the president.
The two-year term for the ambassadors-at-large is to end on June 14, 2019, the notice said.
The Organization Act of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (外交部組織法) stipulates that ambassadors can be appointed without remuneration if necessary.
They are tasked with helping the government promote relations with other countries, the act says.
Aside from planning and coordinating international events and exchanges, the ambassadors are also tasked with establishing, directing and supervising diplomatic missions abroad, it says.
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