The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday declined to comment after former White House national security adviser John Bolton questioned US President Donald Trump’s commitment to Taiwan.
In his book The Room Where it Happened: A White House Memoir, Bolton wrote that Trump had sought the help of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) for his re-election bid in November and that the president was “particularly dyspeptic” about Taiwan.
Trump often compared Taiwan to the tip of his Sharpies pen and China to his Resolute desk, he wrote.
Xi had urged the Trump administration not to allow President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) to travel to the US or to sell arms to Taiwan, while US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo once held back a congressional notification on an F-16 sale to Taiwan as he was worried that Trump might refuse to proceed with it, Bolton wrote.
Bolton served as national security adviser from April 2018 to September last year.
Asked to comment on Bolton’s book, ministry spokeswoman Joanne Ou (歐江安) at a regular news briefing in Taipei yesterday said that the ministry had no comment on the publication of the book, while reaffirming strong Taiwan-US ties.
Since Trump took office in January 2017, the US has repeatedly reiterated its commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act and the “six assurances,” while approving six arms sales, including a package that includes MK-48 Heavy Weight Torpedoes that was announced last month, she said.
Both nations have continued to boost their interactions, as demonstrated by Tsai’s transits in New York and Denver in July last year on her way to four Caribbean allies, she added.
Tsai’s transits in the two cities marked the longest time that a Taiwanese president had stayed in the US, Ou said.
Tsai also attended events at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office alongside allies’ permanent representatives to the UN, also a breakthrough, she said.
The nation would continue to deepen its partnerships with the US based on mutual trust, she added.
Liya Chu (朱如茵), whose parents are New York-based Taiwanese restaurateurs, has been crowned the champion of US television cooking competition MasterChef Junior, after wowing the judges, including celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, with a feast of fusion cuisine. In the finale of the show’s eighth season, broadcast on Thursday, Chu walked away with US$100,000 after serving a spread of spiced duck breast with scallion pancakes and miso eggplant, followed by coconut pandan panna cotta with a passion fruit coulis and sesame tuille. Chu, who was 10 years old at the time of filming three years ago, faced off against then-11-year-old Grayson Price from
A university student has gained the spotlight for an interactive map he designed detailing all of China’s military bases and installations throughout the Indo-Pacific region. Soochow University music student Joseph Wen (溫約瑟), who calls himself an amateur military enthusiast, said he created the map to “help people better understand the cross-strait situation.” Wen originally posted the map online on June 14 last year, but it gained greater attention after he mentioned it during an appearance on a China Television talk show. On the show, Wen said he had gathered information on the locations from publicly available Web sites, as
RISK FACTORS: ‘We hope people can cooperate and endure it ... it is possibly the very important last mile,’ Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung said Taiwan’s COVID-19 restrictions and mask regulations are to remain the same next month, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday. The center reported 42,112 new local COVID-19 cases and 85 deaths, saying that the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients has dropped to a new low this month. Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the CECC, said that the center is keeping COVID-19 restrictions and mask regulations the same due to the local virus situation, and an increase in the number of imported cases of the new Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 of SARS-CoV-2, among other risk factors. Easing
Opening-day ticket sales for a horror exhibition at the Tainan Art Museum were suspended twice on Saturday as the show attracted too many visitors. Titled “Ghosts and Hells: The Underworld in Asian art,” the exhibition runs until Oct. 16. It is the local version of a show that debuted at the Musee du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris. It was planned and curated by Julien Rousseau. The Tainan museum said that within an hour of its doors opening, more than 1,000 people had entered the exhibition. By noon, 3,000 physical and virtual tickets had been sold, while the museum had more than 4,000
RSS