Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou's (
The United Daily News survey found the ratio of people who disapprove of Ma rose 9 percentage points from last month to 26 percent in the wake of the scandal, which provoked a public outcry.
PHOTO: SEAN CHAO, TAIPEI TIMES
The popularity of Ma, under fire from the public and the city government for his weak response to the incident, is now at its lowest ebb since he took office six years ago, according to the survey.
Some 67 percent of those interviewed for the survey, however, said they were still satisfied with Ma's performance, a decline of 8 percent from last month.
The girl, suffering from severe brain damage after being beaten by her drunken father, was referred to a hospital in Taichung after all major hospitals in Taipei refused to treat her.
Hospitals had claimed there was no space to accommodate the girl for urgent brain surgery. She was reported to be in critical condition yesterday after operations in a private hospital in Taichung.
Ma has apologized to the people of Taipei and to the girl's family, admitting it was "beyond comprehension" that the incident took place in a city with superior medical facilities.
Ma said yesterday that he had postponed a trip to Australia to deal with the issue.
"We owe too much to the little girl and we have failed her. She was already suffering a miserable life before being injured [in the abuse by her father,]" Ma told reporters.
"I am really sorry for not being able to provide her with medical treatment in Taipei," he said.
Ma was scheduled to leave for Australia late last night for a meeting on the Deaflympics games. He had also planned to visit Thailand and make a transit stop in Hong Kong.
He said he could not cancel the trip, since Taipei will host the 2009 Deaflympics, but that he would postpone it by two days.
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