President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said he and Vice President-elect Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) are confident Taiwan would be “completely different” when the next presidential election is held in 2016.
Addressing a spring gathering of representatives from the nation’s transportation and communications sectors on Sunday, Ma, who was re-elected on Jan. 14, said the targets he set for his first and second terms would be achieved step by step.
His first-term goals were “rectifying the government and catching up with the rest of the world” — aiming to right what he characterizes as the wrongs done by former -president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) Democratic Progressive Party administration.
His second-term goals are “overhauling the country and marching toward excellence,” Ma said.
One of his policy goals was to lower prices for Internet services, which he said his government had done twice and would keep doing to help consumers enjoy “faster, cheaper and better” Internet access.
Another major achievement Ma boasted was expanding Taiwan’s sea and air transportation links to other parts of the world, saying he was pleased to see his project for a “Northeast Asia air service hub” being realized with the launch of direct flights between Taipei International Airport (Songshan airport) and Gimpo International Airport in Seoul next month.
“A new era dawned in the last year of my first term in office,” Ma said.
He said he paid special attention to developing the country’s air and sea transportation industry because poor development of the industry is very dangerous for an island nation like Taiwan.
“Not having a well-developed sea and air transportation industry, it would greatly dent our international competitiveness,” he said.
He knows many people share his dream of opening up Taiwan to the world and bringing the world to Taiwan — a dream that he would not have a chance to realize had he not been president, 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
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