Taiwan received a letter from WHO Director-General Margaret Chan (陳馮富珍) on Wednesday inviting it to attend the annual World Health Assembly (WHA) to be held in Geneva, Switzerland, from May 16 to May 25, Minister of Foreign Affairs Timothy Yang (楊進添) said yesterday.
Yang confirmed the news in response to a query from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) -Legislator Liu Shen-liang (劉盛良) at the legislature’s Foreign and Defense Affairs Committee.
The WHA is the WHO’s governing body. The invitation will be the third consecutive year Taiwan has been invited to attend the annual world health conference as an observer.
“[This] proves that rapprochement in cross-strait relations is beneficial to the promotion of benign cross-strait interactions in the international arena,” Yang said.
Taiwan was first invited by the WHO on April 28, 2009, to take part as an observer in that year’s WHA meeting under the name “Chinese Taipei.”
This year’s invitation is exactly the same as the one Taiwan received for the last two years, Yang said, referring to the format of the invitation and the manner in which Department of Health Minister Chiu Wen-ta (邱文達) was addressed as “minister.”
Honor guards are to stop performing changing of the guard ceremonies around a statue of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) to avoid “worshiping authoritarianism,” the Ministry of Culture said yesterday. The fate of the bronze statue has long been the subject of fierce and polarizing debate in Taiwan, which has transformed from an autocracy under Chiang into one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies. The changing of the guard each hour at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei is a major tourist attraction, but starting from 9am on Monday, the ceremony is to be moved outdoors to Democracy Boulevard, outside the eponymous blue-and-white memorial
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The government would cancel kendo practitioner Su Yu-cheng’s (蘇郁程) nationality if he is confirmed to have represented China in the World Kendo Championships in Milan, Italy, last week, the Mainland Affairs Council said yesterday. “We have consulted the Sports Administration and were told that athletes participating in the championships must have the nationality of the country that they represent. They must also present their passports as proof,” council spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) told a weekly news conference. “If Su indeed represented China in the championships, we suspect that he has obtained Chinese nationality.” The Act Governing Relations Between the People of the
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