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Taiwan’s new president, Lai Ching-te, has called on Beijing to work with him to achieve peace and common prosperity rather than menace his country as he was sworn into office amid high tensions across the Taiwan Strait.

China should “stop its verbal attacks and military intimidation . . . shoulder global responsibilities together with Taiwan, commit to maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and in the region and ensure that the world is free from the fear of war,” Lai said in his inaugural address on Monday.

Lai appealed to Beijing to engage with Taiwan’s democratically elected government, calling for the resumption of mutual tourism exchanges and programmes bringing Chinese students to Taiwan.

Senior officials in Lai’s incoming government said the pledge to resume exchanges was a concrete gesture of goodwill. The Chinese government has blamed Taiwan for an almost complete breakdown in cross-Strait interaction, though Taipei insists that Beijing has hindered a resumption of programmes.

The Chinese Communist party claims that Taiwan is part of China and threatens to use force to bring it under its control if Taipei resists unification indefinitely. It has denounced Lai as a “dangerous separatist”, rhetoric even more hostile than its rejection of his predecessor, Tsai Ing-wen.

As he sought to reassure the US, Lai invoked much of the language that Tsai — whose prudent China policy drew plaudits abroad — used to describe Taiwan’s status and its relationship with Beijing.

Lai pledged that his government would “neither yield nor provoke, and maintain the status quo” across the Taiwan Strait and “uphold the four commitments” made by Tsai, including sticking to the country’s free and democratic constitutional system.

Other commitments are that the Republic of China — Taiwan’s official name — and the People’s Republic of China should not be subordinate to each other; to resist annexation or encroachment upon Taiwan’s sovereignty; and to ensure that the country’s future must be decided in accordance with the will of the Taiwanese people.

“Since the future of the two sides of the Strait has a decisive impact on the global situation, we . . . will be the helmsmen of peace,” Lai said.

Lai also called on Beijing to acknowledge the existence of the ROC, another phrase borrowed from Tsai. Founded on the mainland, the ROC has persisted in Taiwan after it was defeated in China’s 1949 Communist revolution.

But he added his own note on national identity, saying: “No matter if [it is] the Republic of China, Republic of China Taiwan or Taiwan, these names [that] we ourselves or our international friends call our country all resonate and shine the same.”

Although the CCP refuses to recognise the ROC, Chinese leaders are even more alarmed by references to “Taiwan”, which are often interpreted as a signal of support for Taiwanese independence.

“Lai’s statement that prosperous coexistence should be a common goal for the two sides echoes Beijing’s recent call for him to choose between peaceful development or confrontation,” said Danny Russel, vice-president for international security and diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

But his pledge to neither yield nor provoke while maintaining the status quo is “certain to fall flat with Beijing”, added Russel, who was an assistant secretary of state under US president Barack Obama. “There is virtually nothing that Lai could have said, short of ‘unconditional surrender’, that would satisfy Beijing.”

Lai also faces attempts by opposition parties to expand the powers of the legislature — in which he lacks a majority — and weaken security legislation. On Monday he urged his domestic rivals to avoid political gain at the cost of national interests.

He pledged to expand Taiwan’s global role by leveraging its strength in the semiconductor industry and committed to making the country’s economic growth more inclusive and strengthening social security.

US secretary of state Antony Blinken said that Washington looked forward to “working with President Lai and across Taiwan’s political spectrum to advance our shared interests and values, deepen our long-standing unofficial relationship and maintain peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait”.

Japan’s chief cabinet secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi called Taiwan an “extremely crucial partner and important friend” in congratulatory remarks that expressed hopes of further deepening their relationship.

Ed Dwight poses for a portrait to promote the National Geographic documentary film “The Space Race” during the Winter Television Critics Association Press Tour, Thursday, in February.

Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

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Ed Dwight poses for a portrait to promote the National Geographic documentary film “The Space Race” during the Winter Television Critics Association Press Tour, Thursday, in February.

Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

Ed Dwight, the man who six decades ago nearly became America’s first Black astronaut, made his first trip into space at age 90 on Sunday along with five crewmates aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket.

The liftoff from a West Texas launch site marked the first passenger flight in nearly two years for the commercial space venture run by billionaire Jeff Bezos. The approximately 10-minute suborbital flight put Dwight in the history books as the oldest person ever to reach space. He beat out Star Trek actor William Shatner for that honor by just a few months. Shatner was a few months younger when he went up on a New Shepard rocket in 2021.

Dwight shared the capsule with Mason Angel, a venture capitalist; Sylvain Chiron, the founder of a French craft brewery; entrepreneur Kenneth Hess; aviator Gopi Thotakura and Carol Schaller, a retired accountant.

The rocket reached more than 347,000 feet, crossing the 330,000 foot high Kármán line, the imaginary line that denotes the boundary of space. They experienced a few brief moments of weightlessness.

Soon after, the New Shepard booster touched down in a cloud of dust near the launch site. The crew capsule landed under two of its three parachutes, with one redundant chute failing to fully deploy.

Emerging from the capsule, a beaming Dwight shook two fists in the air in triumph.

“Fantastic! A life-changing experience. Everyone needs to do this!” he remarked. “I didn’t know I needed this in my life, but now I need it in my life.”

He said the separation of the rocket and the capsule was “more dynamic” than he’d anticipated.

In the 1960s, Dwight, an Air Force captain, was fast tracked for space flight after then-President John F. Kennedy asked for a Black astronaut. Despite graduating in the top half of a test pilot school, Dwight was subsequently passed over for selection as an astronaut, a story he detailed in his autobiography, Soaring On The Wings Of A Dream: The Untold Story of America’s First Black Astronaut Candidate.

After leaving the Air Force, Dwight went on to become a celebrated sculptor, specializing in creating likenesses of historic African American figures.

Speaking with NPR by phone a few hours after Sunday’s launch, Dwight said, “I’ve got bragging rights now.”

“All these years, I’ve been called an astronaut,” Dwight said, but “now I have a little [astronaut] pin, which is … a totally different matter.”

He said he’d been up to 80,000 feet in test flights during his Air Force career, but at four times that altitude aboard New Shepard, the curvature of the Earth was more pronounced. “That line between the atmosphere and space. It was like somebody pulled the curtains down over the windows,” he said.

The cost of Dwight’s ticket is being shared among Blue Origin, Space for Humanity and the Jaison and Jamie Robinson Family Foundation. (Jaison Robinson, who flew on a previous Blue Origin flight, is on the NPR Foundation Board of Trustees.)

The first crewed New Shepard flight was launched in July 2020 and included Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos, pilot Wally Funk and 18-year-old Dutch citizen Oliver Daemen, who was, at the time of launch, the youngest person ever to go into space.

Dwight told NPR he was ready to go again. “I want to go into orbit. I want to go around the Earth and see the whole Earth. That’s what I want to do now.”

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Washington’s G7 allies are warming to a US plan to rush tens of billions of dollars in funding to Ukraine before Donald Trump’s potential return to the White House.

Under the plan, set to be discussed at a June summit, Kyiv would receive money upfront from a G7 loan. The loan would be backed by future profits generated from around $350bn of Russian assets which have been immobilised in the west in response to Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Some G7 members have been reluctant to endorse the plan but their sentiments have shifted after a diplomatic push by the US, which is seeking to secure agreement at a summit of G7 leaders next month, according to eight western officials.

The plan would generate around $50bn to be disbursed to Ukraine as early as this summer, US officials have said. The funding would arrive at a crucial time for Kyiv as its forces struggle to hold the line amid a renewed Russian offensive following delays in delivery of western military aid.

The more reluctant G7 members have warmed to the plan as a way to ensure long-term funding for Kyiv if Joe Biden loses this year’s presidential election to Trump, who has opposed US aid to Ukraine.

It could be “done before November so, even if Trump wins, the money has already been deployed”, one person involved in the discussions said.

Officials from Italy, which holds the rotating G7 presidency, have said the summit will seek to reach consensus on how to “maximise the use of windfall profits to ensure the long-term financing of Ukraine”.

Negotiations are ongoing ahead of a meeting of G7 finance ministers and central bank governors in Italy in the coming week, when the issue will be discussed.

“I feel there is momentum and there is interest,” a senior US Treasury official said on Friday. “And what we’re involved in is trying to engage in hard, detailed economic diplomacy to make sure we can all get on the same page. And I think we’re making progress there.”

The US wants to include language in the joint G7 statement referring to leveraging the proceeds from Russians state assets — and has secured backing from Canada and the UK, the western officials said.

France, Germany, Italy and Japan have previously opposed more far-reaching US plans, such as seizing Russia’s underlying assets, fearing it could create a precedent for the seizure of state property and wreak havoc in financial markets. They have shown more openness in recent weeks to the idea of leveraging profits to generate loans for Ukraine, officials have said.

These four countries are “coming around”, one official said.

Details are yet to be agreed, however, the official added, including who would issue the debt — the US alone or G7 countries via a special purpose vehicle — who would guarantee it, and how risks and repayment would be shared in case the future profits don’t materialise.

The senior US Treasury official said any decision would be “fundamentally a political decision, one that’s going to be taken by leaders” of the G7 next month. “The goal is to have consensus coming out of the finance ministers to provide advice to leaders,” the US official said.

A different person familiar with the talks on Russian sovereign assets said the US was not driven by the timing of the election.

Separately, EU countries earlier this month agreed to use part of these profits to jointly buy weapons for Ukraine. Under that plan, Belgium’s central security depository Euroclear, where most Russian-sanctioned state assets being held in the bloc are stuck, would pay out the first tranche of profits as soon as July. 

The G7 scheme faced an additional snag, according to officials in Brussels, since any plan to leverage the profits would need a fresh unanimous decision at EU level. Countries such as Hungary could potentially cause more delays.

Additional reporting from Kana Inagaki in Tokyo and Martha Muir in Washington