President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday said his administration was not opposed to the country’s diplomatic allies developing economic relations with China and that both sides of the Taiwan Strait had a “tacit agreement” not to steal each other’s diplomatic allies.
Praising his “diplomatic truce” policy, Ma said it had produced “remarkable” results and that China and Taiwan have a mutual understanding that they should not woo each other’s diplomatic allies.
“We hope to extend cross-strait detente to the international community,” Ma said. “Now we [Taipei and Beijing] mutually respect each other and get along peacefully in the international community. This has never happened in the past 60 years.”
Ma said the goal of his diplomatic policy was to strengthen the government’s relationships with its diplomatic allies while at the same time improving ties with China and reducing friction with China in the international arena.
Ma said his administration would not discourage Taiwan’s allies from developing “unofficial economic relations” with China because this is a part of globalization.
Ma made the remarks while meeting Haitian Minister of Foreign Affairs Alrich Nicolas at the Presidential Office yesterday morning.
It marked Nicolas’ first trip to Taiwan since he took office last September. Ma said he believed high-level visits between the two countries were helpful to promoting bilateral cooperation projects, adding that the administration hoped to continue this relationship and share the Taiwan’s experience with economic development.
Ma thanked the Caribbean ally for assisting his administration’s “aggressive” efforts to participate in the international community. He extended his thanks to Haitian President Rene Preval’s for the latter’s concern following Typhoon Morakot, which Ma described as causing “the worst flooding, unprecedented in this century.”
As of yesterday, the number of confirmed fatalities had reached 619, with 76 listed as missing or presumed dead. The Web site of the National Disaster Prevention and Protection Commission showed that the Kaohsiung area reported 491 fatalities, followed by Pingtung with 27 and Tainan with 25.
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