President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) arrived on the US Pacific island of Guam yesterday on her way back from visiting Taiwan’s diplomatic allies in the Pacific.
While the office of Guam Governor Edward Calvo described it as a “private and unofficial visit,” Tsai was provided a police escort upon her arrival.
Legislature of Guam senators were in attendance at a welcome reception for Tsai hosted by Calvo, who spoke of “island nations that share a common vision of peace and prosperity.”
In response, Tsai spoke of Guam’s attractions as a tropical island and called it an “ideal place to visit.”
“I am confident we can bring Guam and Taiwan closer,” she said.
Guam is home to a large US military base and would be key to any US assistance to Taiwan in the event of a conflict with China.
Tsai on Saturday last week left Taiwan on a state visit to three Pacific island allies which took her to the Marshall Islands, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu.
She had a layover in Hawaii en route to the Marshall Islands, her first destination, and was transiting through Guam on her return leg to Taiwan today.
Minister of Foreign Affairs David Lee (李大維) on Thursday said that Tsai’s planned stopover in Guam was the outcome of consultations with the US.
Lee was responding to a report in the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) that Tsai had originally planned to transit through Hawaii on her outbound and homeward flights, but as US President Donald Trump is stopping in Hawaii for a layover en route to Asia, Washington arranged for her to transit in Guam to avoid complicating relations between Washington, Beijing and Taipei before Trump’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
In other news, Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday said that St Lucian Prime Minister Allen Chastanet is to visit Taiwan from Wednesday to Saturday, to broaden cooperation between the two countries.
Chastanet will be visiting Taiwan for the second time since he took office as the Caribbean island nation’s prime minister in June last year.
Chastanet is to meet with Tsai, Premier William Lai (賴清德), Lee and Legislative Speaker Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) during his four-day visit to exchange ideas on expanding Taiwan-St Lucia cooperation, the ministry said.
Since Taiwan and St Lucia resumed diplomatic relations in 2007, the two countries have established cooperative projects in agriculture, humanitarian aid, infrastructure, education, healthcare and information technology, the ministry 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