The government is in contact with the US about a Nov. 14 meeting in Washington of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said yesterday.
French Minister of Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves Le Drian on Oct. 10 called for an emergency meeting of the US-led coalition, following US President Donald Trump’s withdrawal of US troops from northeast Syria and Turkey’s launch of a cross-border offensive in the area.
The US Department of State on Monday said that US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo was looking forward to hosting the meeting to review the steps in the campaign to defeat the Islamic State group, which is known by several acronyms, including IS and ISIS.
Photo: Tu Chien-jong, Taipei Times
The statement followed Trump’s announcement on Sunday that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been killed the previous day.
Discussions in Washington would focus on the continued fight against the Islamic State “in the post-liberation era and following the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, with a particular focus on recent developments in northeast Syria and their relationship to stability and security of the region,” the department said.
Since Taiwan joined the coalition in October 2014, it has been supporting humanitarian assistance and stabilization work, ministry spokeswoman Joanne Ou (歐江安) said when asked about the Washington meeting during a regular news briefing in Taipei.
Representative to the US Stanley Kao (高碩泰) was on Feb. 6 invited to a coalition meeting in Washington and used the opportunity to donate US$500,000 to Nadia’s Initiative, a non-governmental organization that helps people in Islamic State-targeted regions reconstruct their homelands, on behalf of Taiwan’s government, Ou said.
The Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the US remains in contact with the US government and Taiwan continues to fulfill its responsibility as a member of the global community, working with the US and other like-minded nations to promote long-term peace and stability in the Middle East, she 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