The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday sidestepped the issue of a possible meeting between President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), saying the existing model for high-level cross-strait talks offered the best communication channel and has produced solid results.
Saying Ma has made it clear that it was premature to talk about the possibility of meeting Hu, MAC Deputy Minister Liu Te-shun (劉德勳) said the council had nothing to add to the president's comments.
Liu said the high-level talks that have been held between Taiwan and China since May last year have brought sound economic benefits.
The MAC deputy minister made the remarks in response to media inquiries about comments by China's Taiwan Affairs Office Director Wang Yi (王毅). The Chinese-language China Times reported that Wang had told the World Journal that it was up to Ma whether the president would visit China in the role of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman.
Ma is the sole candidate in the KMT's chairmanship election scheduled for July 26.
The KMT said yesterday that Ma has garnered more than 90,000 signatures in support of his chairmanship campaign.
Vice Legislative Speaker Tseng Yung-chuan (曾永權), who doubles as the secretary-general of Ma's campaign office, said Ma would submit the signatures to party headquarters when he registers on Thursday.
Registration opens tomorrow and ends on Thursday. To be eligible for registration, Ma needs the signatures of 3 percent of registered KMT members, or 15,000 people.
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