Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) Spokesman Henry Chen (陳銘政) yesterday admitted giving reporters incorrect information on the situation in Honduras on Sunday, but said he was under no obligation to respond to media inquiries in a timely manner.
Chen was the target of ridicule from several Chinese-language newspapers after he told reporters on Sunday that Honduras was not experiencing a coup even though Honduran President Manuel Zelaya had been arrested by the military and forcibly exiled to Costa Rica two hours before he made his remarks.
The spokesman called reporters back 24 minutes later to set the record straight and said that, according to information from the Republic of China embassy in Honduras, a coup d’etat had indeed taken place and that Zelaya had been yanked from his bed by the armed forces in the middle of the night.
PHOTO: CNA
Members of the media and the pan-green camp accused the ministry of being slow and oblivious to the latest developments in one of Taiwan’s allies.
What made it worse, they said, was that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) had been scheduled to arrive in Tegucigalpa on Friday for a two-day visit.
Speaking to reporters yesterday, Chen said he would accept responsibility for what he said, but added that he had spoken “too fast” because he “trusted” reporters and that he could easily have waited 30 minutes to an hour for an official statement from his superiors before responding.
“The fate of the foreign ministry is that we can be misunderstood, but we can never be wrong. This is why we are always adamant that we must receive an official statement before speaking to the press,” he said.
Chen said the president had no plan to meet with Zelaya while they are both in Nicaragua, but added that “anything could happen.”
Chen later told reporters that Taiwan would recognize whoever has been legally elected through democratic means and that Taipei had already made contact with Roberto Micheletti, who has been named as interim president until the Honduran presidential term ends in January.
Taiwan last night joined several other countries, including the US, in strongly condemning the coup in Honduras.
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