The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday said it has no plans to set up commercial representative offices in the Dominican Republic and Burkina Faso after the nation’s embassies are removed.
According to the timetable agreed upon with the Dominican Republic, Taiwan’s embassy is scheduled to close today, ministry spokesman Andrew Lee (李憲章) told a routine morning news conference at the ministry in Taipei.
“As for Burkina Faso, the concerned ministry divisions are scheduled to hold a meeting in the following days to discuss the removal of our embassy before we begin negotiations with the other side on the matter,” Lee said.
Past experience suggests that the embassy would be moved within a month, he added.
Burkina Faso on Thursday last week became the latest nation to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan before establishing formal ties with Beijing on Saturday. The Dominican Republic broke off relations with Taiwan and established ties with Beijing on April 30.
The government has never opened a commercial representative office in a formerly allied nation to refrain from setting a dangerous precedent and to prevent further belittlement of the nation’s personnel stationed there, said a high-level government official, who spoke condition of anonymity.
“We have never done that before and have no intention of doing so in the future,” he said.
Alex Shyy (史立軍), deputy secretary-general of the International Cooperation and Development Fund, the main governmental agency responsible for foreign aid work, said that seven specialists and six substitute civilian service personnel comprised its technical mission in Burkina Faso.
“All 13 people will return to Taiwan, as will our five specialists stationed in the Dominican Republic,” Shyy said. “However, the five substitute civilian service workers in the nation’s mission in the Dominican Republic will be reposted to neighboring countries.”
Touting some of the agency’s latest diplomatic achievements, Shyy said it last month sent a group of experts to Palau on a two-week mission to train 50 Palauans how to use taro in various food products, such as pancakes, pastries and ice cream.
“This mission is in line with the Palauan government’s goal of re-establishing taro as the nation’s main staple,” Shyy said, adding that the agency would send experts to Palau again for further training classes if necessary.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the