President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) will visit Honduras on Jan. 27 and Jan. 28 to attend the inauguration of president-elect Porfirio Lobo Sosa, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday.
Ma and a small entourage will depart on Jan. 25 and make a one-night stopover in San Francisco before heading to the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, ministry officials said.
On his fourth visit to Central America since taking office in 2008, Ma will be accompanied by several key officials, including National Security Council Secretary-General Su Chi (蘇起) and Minister of Foreign Affairs Timothy Yang (楊進添).
First lady Chow Mei-ching (周美青) will not accompany him, nor will any business entrepreneurs or leading cultural figures, officials said.
Besides a dinner with US-based Taiwanese expatriates, no public activities will be scheduled for Ma during his stopover in San Francisco, although he will have telephone conversations with some “US friends” over issues of mutual concern, officials said.
Ma is scheduled to return to Taiwan on Jan. 30 after making a short stopover in Los Angeles. He will not stay the night there but will take a night flight home, the officials said.
So far, the greatest variables on Ma's forthcoming trip include the whereabouts of former Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted in a military coup in Honduras last June, and whether interim President Roberto Micheletti will step down prior to Lobo's inauguration, they said.
“We are closely monitoring the situation,” officials said.
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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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