Honduran president-elect Xiomara Castro’s team has promised that the Central American nation’s diplomatic ties with Taiwan are to remain unchanged, despite Castro’s statement during her campaign that she would switch recognition to China if she won, Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) said yesterday.
“After the election, our embassy in Honduras established contact with the campaign staff [of Castro] and the vice president-elect,” Wu told lawmakers at the Legislative Yuan.
“They gave us their word that diplomatic ties will not be affected,” Wu said, adding that Castro would assume office on Jan. 27.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
He did not say if Taiwan would be sending a delegation to attend her inauguration ceremony.
Castro’s victory in the country’s presidential election on Nov. 28 means that she is to become its first female president.
However, Castro’s presidency might end the 80-year diplomatic relationship between Taiwan and Honduras.
The 62-year-old wife of ousted former Honduran president Jose Manuel Zelaya had said during her campaign that she would switch diplomatic relations to China if she won, although one of her close aides later said no final decision had been made.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) congratulated Castro on her victory in a Twitter post on Wednesday last week.
Castro retweeted the post and thanked Tsai, in a move interpreted by some to mean that the nations’ ties would remain intact.
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