Two US senators on Tuesday introduced a WHO accountability bill, seeking to withhold US funding until the organization reforms its leadership and accepts Taiwan as a member state.
US President Joe Biden has since his inauguration on Jan. 20 signed a flurry of executive orders, including one to stop the US’ withdrawal from the WHO, reversing former US president Donald Trump’s decision last year.
A WHO task force probing the origins of COVID-19 in China on Tuesday wrapped up its investigation with no breakthroughs, although it ruled out a theory that the novel coronavirus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory.
Photo: Reuters
“The mission of the WHO is to get public health information to the world so every country can make the best decisions to keep their citizens safe. The WHO not only failed its mission, but it failed the world when it comes to the coronavirus. They served as a puppet for the Chinese Communist Party — parroting misinformation and helping communist China cover up a global pandemic,” US Senator Rick Scott, a Republican, said in a news release on Tuesday.
“Last February, I called on the WHO to do its own in-depth analysis on the extent and origins of the coronavirus. It took them nearly a year to take action and we still have no answer,” he said.
“They are complicit in communist China’s effort to isolate Taiwan. There is no reason US taxpayers should be spending hundreds of millions a year, more than any other country, to fund the WHO without significant reform,” he added.
Taiwan attended the World Health Assembly, the decisionmaking body of the WHO, as an observer from 2009 to 2016, but has since been denied access.
Scott said he is proud to introduce the bill to withhold US taxpayer dollars from the WHO “until they start actually caring about public health, stop acting like a puppet for the communist China and allow Taiwan as a member.”
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and other WHO leaders must be held accountable for their dereliction of duty, and the WHO should not benefit from US tax dollars again before it undertakes comprehensive reforms, US Senator Josh Hawley, also a Republican, said in the same news release.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
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