Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) request to visit Malaysia and the US next month has been approved, Presidential Office spokesman Alex Huang (黃重諺) said yesterday.
A Presidential Office screening committee considered the request based on the Classified National Security Information Protection Act (國家機密保護法) and gave Ma the green light because the risks to national intelligence and Ma’s personal safety were controllable, Huang said.
“Taiwan maintains cooperative mechanisms with the two countries, so the risks related to Ma’s personal security in the two countries are relatively low,” Huang said, citing an assessment by the National Security Bureau.
The government would provide all necessary assistance during Ma’s trips, he said.
Ma’s office said the former president plans to leave on Nov. 15 for a visit to Malaysia and then travel to the US after returning from Malaysia on Nov. 18.
Ma, who completed his second and final term as president in May, has accepted an invitation to attend the eighth World Chinese Economic Summit in Malaysia from Nov. 16 to Nov. 18.
He is also to deliver a speech at Southern University College in Johor, the office said.
He has been invited by the University of Notre Dame in Indiana to attend its second Asian leadership forum on Nov. 20 and deliver a keynote speech, it said.
After his visit to the university, Ma plans to travel to Chicago for a brief stay, during which time he will meet Taiwanese expatriates, before returning home on Nov. 23, it 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
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
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