The Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation (TAEF) on Monday signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with India’s largest think tank, the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), with the aim of fostering high-level dialogue between the two nations.
During a video conference on Monday, the two think tanks said they would jointly publish an annual report on Taiwan-India bilateral government policies and would cooperate on organizing annual high-level talks between the two governments.
ORF president Samir Saran said he believed it was important for the two countries to understand the local risks each other was facing and the local opportunities each presented.
Photo courtesy of the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation
In the face of changing political and economic situations, the two countries must work closely together to maintain regional security, he said.
In the short term, the think tanks said they would organize non-governmental exchanges, and would cooperate on research and policy advocacy, TAEF president Hsiao Hsin-huang (蕭新煌) said.
“India has already become an important partner of Taiwan under President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) New Southbound Policy,” he said. “Through our diversified cooperation with ORF we can further advance mutual understanding between our two countries.”
TAEF executive director Yang Hao (楊昊) said the MOU represented an upgrading of Taiwan-India relations.
The TAEF is Taiwan’s first non-governmental think tank with a focus on South and Southeast Asian affairs. It was established in 2018 to promote comprehensive exchanges with ASEAN and South Asian countries, as well as New Zealand and Australia.
The ORF is India’s largest private, nonprofit policy think tank, dedicated to promoting Indian policy through research, international academic cooperation and dialogue.
It jointly hosts in collaboration with the Indian Ministry of External Affairs the annual Raisina Dialogue in New Dehli, India’s largest conference on international politics and the economy.
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