Relations with Germany continue to warm as German-Taiwan Parliamentary Friendship Group chairman Klaus-Peter Willsch, leading a six-person delegation, left Germany for a six-day visit to Taiwan yesterday.
The visit is yet another move by Berlin this year in support of Taiwan. The German Bundestag in May unanimously passed a resolution to support Taiwan’s bid to participate in the WHO as an observer.
German Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach added his support for Taiwan’s participation at the World Health Assembly this year.
Photo: Screen grab from the facebook page of Representative to Germany Shieh Jhy-wey
German Minister of Foreign Affairs Annalena Baerbock in August voiced support for Taiwan in light of Beijing’s military response to US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.
A progress report on Germany’s policy guidelines for the Indo-Pacific region released last month said that the country was against any non-peaceful change to the “status quo” across the Taiwan Strait.
It was the first time that Taiwan was mentioned in a progress report about the policy.
Taiwan and Germany also signed an air services accord in July last year that saw flights between the two countries increase from seven to 11 flights per week, and laid the basis for EVA Airways to launch a new direct route from Taipei to Munich next month.
Democratic Progressive Party legislators twice last month visited Germany to deepen Taiwan-Germany parliamentary relations, while the Legislative Yuan on Wednesday founded the Taiwan and German Parliamentary Friendship Association.
“We cannot allow China to move goalposts to isolate Taiwan, let alone to break international law,” German Ambassador to the US Emily Haber wrote on Twitter on Thursday.
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
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
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