Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) office announced yesterday that Ma has decided to send a prerecorded speech to an award ceremony in Hong Kong tomorrow due to his inability to attend the event in person.
Ma’s office said following the Presidential Office’s rejection of Ma’s application to visit Hong Kong to attend the Society of Publishers in Asia’s Awards for Editorial Excellence ceremony scheduled for tomorrow, the group issued a statement expressing its disappointment and expressed the hope that the former president could prerecord his planned speech.
“After thorough consideration, Ma has agreed to prerecord the speech so as to speak for Taiwan in front of international media,” Ma’s office said.
Photo: CNA
The group published its statement hours after Presidential Office spokesman Alex Huang (黃重諺) announced the office’s decision to turn down Ma’s travel request on Sunday afternoon, in which it said the former president planned to arrange a video link for him to give his remarks in lieu of a face-to-face speech.
“We are disappointed that Mr Ma cannot be with us in person, but we look forward to a very successful Wednesday evening with awards being given out in 18 categories for the best journalism in the Asia-Pacific region,” the statement quoted Editorial Committee chairwoman S.K. Witcher as saying.
The Presidential Office review of Ma’s application also cited the former president’s proposal to make a prerecorded speech for a public event to be held by a Hong Kong media outlet next month.
“Hong Kong’s Yazhou Zhoukan (亞洲週刊) invited Ma this spring to attend a book fair next month and to deliver a speech. However, given that the invitation from the society, which was issued earlier than that of Yazhou Zhoukan, was still under evaluation and the two events are to be held one after another... Ma declined the media outlet’s invitation,” Ma’s office said.
“These two cases are different and it is difficult to compare them. We regret that the Presidential Office was not able to disclose more information,” it said.
Separately yesterday, Ma said outside his residence in Taipei’s Wenshan District (文山) that the Presidential Office’s denial of his ‘application has galvanized significant controversy in society.
“Is such a decision necessary, fair or rational? I believe society will be the judge of that,” he said.
In response, Huang said the decision was made after the discreet deliberations of several government agencies and the ad hoc group based on the statutes of the Classified National Security Information Protection Act (國家機密保護法).
“Reading too much political meaning into this case will not be of any concrete help,” Huang 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