President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday said he expected diplomatic relations with the Marshall Islands to remain strong as he welcomed Marshall Islands President Christopher Loeak.
The welcoming ceremony was held in the morning at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei with a military salute. Although a magnitude 6.1 earthquake rocked Taiwan during the ceremony, it did not affect the event.
Speaking at the ceremony, Ma said the two nations have maintained strong relations since establishing ties in 1998, and expressed his hope that the Marshall Islands, a member of the UN and several global organizations, would continue voicing support for Taiwan’s participation in international organizations.
Photo: Sam Yeh, AFP
Later, while presiding over the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) Central Standing Committee meeting, the president defended his recent trip to the Vatican as a successful diplomatic overture and dismissed Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators’ criticism that his gift to the new pope — a Franz vase embossed with the design of a magpie — was inappropriate because magpies are viewed as a bad omen in Europe.
Ma said the Vatican’s top envoy to Taiwan, Monsignor Paul Russell, had assured him and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the Holy See did not see any problem with the gift and that the pope would accept the gift with gratitude, he said.
Ma lauded the ministry’s efforts to expand the nation’s international space as he listened to a briefing by Minister of Foreign Affairs David Lin’s (林永樂) about the Vatican trip during the committee meeting.
He dismissed concerns about Beijing’s pressure on the Holy See to sever its ties with Taiwan, but said that the two sides of the Taiwan Strait should support each other in the international community.
“We should still wait and see if the vicious interactions of the two sides of the Taiwan Strait in the international community can become more positive … We should support and tolerate each other to maintain peaceful and long-lasting relations,” he said.
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
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