Representative to the US King Pu-tsung (金溥聰) has been invited to attend the US National Prayer Breakfast scheduled for Feb. 7, but there will be no official delegation from Taiwan representing the government at the event, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Steve Hsia (夏季昌) said yesterday.
Hsia made the remarks in a rebuttal to a report in the Chinese-language United Evening News yesterday, which said the organizer of the US National Prayer Breakfast had not extended an invitation to the Taiwanese government to participate in the event.
The paper said President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration persuaded Sean Lien (連勝文), a central committee member of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and son of former KMT chairman Lien Chan (連戰), to defer the honor to King and that Ma had designated King to be present at the meeting on behalf of his administration.
Hsia said the report was incorrect, as the invitation to King and his wife, Chou Huei-ting (周慧婷), was sent directly from the organizer.
“Although there will be no official delegation from Taiwan attending the prayer meeting, it is not unusual. There was no official delegation in 2008,” Hsia said.
As Taiwan-US relations are currently good and there are various channels to conduct communications, the government does not place as much emphasis as it had previously on the prayer meeting, which used to serve as a opportunity for government representatives to meet with US officials when ties were weaker, a ministry official 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