Marshall Islands President Kessai Note is scheduled to arrive in Taipei today for a five-day visit, his sixth in the past five years.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that Note would meet President Chen Shui-bian (
Note first visited Taiwan in May 2002, and then in May and December 2004. Note and his wife visited at Chen's invitation in April 2005 and November last year.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman David Wang (
A source told the Taipei Times that Note would play golf with former presidential advisor Koo Kwan-min (
As Chen is scheduled to visit the Marshall Islands in October, Wang said that Note was expected to discuss details of the upcoming Taiwan Pacific Allies Summit with Chen during their meeting.
Wang confirmed yesterday that Taiwan had promised to donate US$5 million to the Marshall Islands to build facilities for the summit to be held in the capital, Majuro, in October.
The facilities will be donated to the Marshall Islands following the summit, he said.
The first summit of Taiwanese allies was held in Palau in September last year, bringing Chen together with the heads of the six Pacific island states holding diplomatic ties with Taipei. They are the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, Nauru, Palau, the Solomon Islands and Kiribati.
Wang declined to say what Taiwan's annual grants to the Marshall Islands amounted to, saying that the government wanted to keep the total secret from China.
During last year's Taiwanese allies summit, Chen said that it was unlikely that the nation's Pacific allies would switch their diplomatic alliance to China in the foreseeable future, and that his administration would carefully manage relations with them and other diplomatic partners.
He also said that Taiwan was different from China in terms of offering aid packages, because "we don't write blank checks. Instead, we offer practical and useful programs designed to solve their problems."
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
THE TOUR: Pope Francis has gone on a 12-day visit to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore. He was also invited to Taiwan The government yesterday welcomed Pope Francis to the Asia-Pacific region and said it would continue extending an invitation for him to visit Taiwan. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs made the remarks as Pope Francis began a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific on Monday. He is to travel about 33,000km by air to visit Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore, and would arrive back in Rome on Friday next week. It would be the longest and most challenging trip of Francis’ 11-year papacy. The 87-year-old has had health issues over the past few years and now uses a wheelchair. The ministry said
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi
RSS