Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Minister Lai Shin-yuan (賴幸媛) yesterday said the council has authorized the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) to negotiate with China on nuclear safety.
If both sides come to an agreement, the issue would be placed on the agenda of the next high-level cross-strait talks between SEF Chairman Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤) and his Chinese counterpart, Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林), this year, she said.
“We will do our best to put the issue of nuclear safety on the agenda of the upcoming Chiang-Chen meeting,” she told the legislature’s Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee. “China’s Taiwan Affairs Office [TAO] has responded positively to our proposal.”
TAO spokeswoman Fan Liqing (范麗青) said yesterday in Beijing that China attached great importance to nuclear safety, which she said concerned the wellbeing of people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
Exchange channels for nuclear safety and technology have been smooth, she said, adding that the two sides could propose ideas or “discuss and communicate” with each other if they think it is necessary.
During the upcoming Chiang-Chen meeting, the two sides have agreed to negotiate two issues on the protection of investment and dispute settlement. If all goes well, they hope to sign agreements on these two areas, she said.
In the aftermath of Japan’s magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami on March 11, which sparked a radiation leak at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said on Tuesday that nuclear safety would become an important issue in future cross-strait negotiations after he expressed the hope last week that Taipei and Beijing could cooperate in this area.
Lai yesterday said that the Ma administration would take a pro-active approach to achieve these goals, given the importance and urgency of nuclear safety across the Taiwan Strait.
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