Marshall Islands Parliamentary Speaker Kenneth Kedi on Monday said that his nation would always support Taiwan based on the two nations’ shared values of freedom and democracy.
Kedi, who arrived on a four-day visit on Monday morning, told Legislative Speaker Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) at a meeting in Taipei that his nation’s parliament recently passed a resolution expressing the Pacific island nation’s support for Taiwan.
The resolution praises Taiwan’s democratic achievements, and affirms that Taiwan is a worthy partner for peace and prosperity in the region, Kedi said.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
The Marshall Islands was especially intent on passing the resolution at a time when China continues to heighten its hostility toward Taiwan and its allies because of its desire for peace and stability in the region, Kedi said.
Su thanked Kedi for helping seal a bilateral cooperation agreement on policing and another pact on strategic cooperation signed between the two nations last year.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), who met with Kedi and his delegation at the Presidential Office later in the day, thanked the Marshall Islands for its firm backing of Taiwan.
Taiwan values highly its relations with the Pacific island nation and expects exchanges to continue to expand across a broad spectrum of fields, such as education, culture and medicine, Tsai said.
In related news, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday said it is recruiting participants for its youth ambassador program to help build ties with nations in the Pacific, and South and Southeast Asia.
The ministry plans to recruit 75 Taiwanese aged 18 to 35 who are graduate or undergraduate students and send them on 10-day trips to two nations, Department of NGO International Affairs Director-General Scott Lai (賴銘琪) said.
The ambassadors would be divided into three groups of 25 delegates and visit the Solomon Islands and Kiribati, the Philippines and Malaysia, or Thailand and India, Lai said.
The program aims to enhance people-to-people exchanges between Taiwan and the targeted nations, he said.
The ministry is especially looking for participants who speak Malay, Lai said.
It is also hoping that people with expertise in healthcare, engineering or agriculture would sign up for the program, he added.
The ambassadors would visit non-governmental organizations and institutions in their areas of expertise in the targeted nations to make sure their skills are put to good use, Lai said.
Application forms can be downloaded from youthtaiwan.net and taiwanngo.tw.
Applications should be submitted before April 30.
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