President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday said that non-governmental exchanges between Taiwan and the US are a key effort in strengthening bilateral ties.
Speaking at the launch of the US-Taiwan Policy Forum, Ma said that relations between the two countries are at their best since diplomatic ties were severed in 1979, noting that Washington has described Taiwan as an important economic and security partner on many occasions in recent years.
Pushing those ties further will require continued cooperation across various sectors, a role that falls on non-governmental organizations and the public, he said.
Ma pointed to the reduced number of Taiwanese students being educated in the US as an area that could be improved.
The US-Taiwan Policy Forum is a joint project of the Taipei Forum Foundation and the Washington-based Brookings Institution.
A ceremony was also held to celebrate the establishment of the Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies, a Brookings program.
Former American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) chairman Richard Bush, now the director of the Brookings Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies, will be the program’s first chair holder.
Acting AIT director Brent Christensen, who was also at the ceremony, praised the longstanding cooperative relationship between Taiwan and the US based on a mutual commitment to democracy and freedom.
He said that the US attaches a high value to its special, mutually beneficial relationship with Taiwan.
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