President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday urged domestic groups to sponsor Haitian orphans after the Caribbean country was hit by a devastating earthquake earlier this month.
“Haiti may need 10 or even 20 years to be able to return to where it was before the earthquake. What will happen to the tens of thousands of orphans in the meantime?” the president said.
He urged domestic groups to pitch in, saying that nongovernmental organizations such as World Vision Taiwan and the Taiwan Fund for Children and Families have a wealth of experience in sponsoring impoverished children internationally.
He said Taiwan’s participation in post-quake rescue operations has shown the international community that Taiwan is a country that puts humanitarian ideals into practice.
Over the past year, Ma said, the government has advocated cross-strait reconciliation and humanitarian ideas, and Taiwan’s rescue team has impressed the international community.
If Taiwan sponsors Haitian orphans, coupled with its efforts to conserve energy and cut carbon emissions, then Taiwan’s image will be very different and the “room for us to join international activities will be increased,” the president said.
“I believe our nation’s image will be exceptionally good then, and that a lot of hurdles will be easier to overcome,” Ma said.
Though Taiwan is a long way from Haiti, Taiwan’s first rescue team departed for the Caribbean country fewer than 12 hours after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti on Jan. 12, Ma 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:
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
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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