The Presidential Office yesterday announced that President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) has offered the nation's help to a seven-year-old Turkish girl who is too poor to receive medical treatment.
The girl, who is afraid to leave her house because of a tumor on her nose, reportedly has no friends and had lived in deplorable conditions since she was born.
Some international wire services publicized the girl's tragic story last week.
"Her father is only a farm worker, who gets paid on a daily basis and he doesn't have enough money to afford medical attention for his daughter," the deputy secretary-general to the president, Joseph Wu (吳釗燮), said yesterday.
According to Wu, the president had learned of the girl's tragic story on Friday and immediately told the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to tell its office in Turkey to communicate Taiwan's willingness to provide medical assistance to the girl.
"On Tuesday, officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported to the Presidential Office and said that the girl had been sent to a hospital in Istanbul for a surgical operation, but her parents still don't have enough money to travel to the city in order to comfort their daughter," Wu said.
"President Chen then told the ministry to give the parents US$1,000 for traveling expenses," Wu said.
He said that the case shows Chen's tight control over Tai-wan's foreign affairs and also shows that Taiwan is sincere about contributing to the international community.
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:
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