Nearly half the population of Tuvalu have been severely affected by the devastation wrought by Cyclone Pam, Tuvaluan Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga said yesterday, with other Pacific island nations also taking a hit.
While the focus has been on devastation in neighboring Vanuatu, Tuvalu — a grouping of nine coral atolls with a population of less than 11,000 — is also struggling to cope, Sopoaga told Radio New Zealand International.
“Forty-five percent of the population of Tuvalu, most of whom are on the outer islands, have been affected, badly, severely affected,” he said of the island chain about 1,550km northeast of Vanuatu. “We are worried about the aftermath in terms of hygiene and supplies of essential materials, like food, medicine and water.”
Photo: EPA
Few details of the impact were given, but Sopoaga said most people living on the outer islands of the diplomatic ally of Taiwan were affected, with houses and crops washed away.
He told the broadcaster there were health and safety concerns after cemeteries were destroyed, adding that government boats were setting off later yesterday to assess the extent of the damage.
Aurelia Balpe, the Fiji-based head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in the Pacific, said there had been extensive flooding in the low-lying nation.
“Tuvalu has had storm surges and up to six of its islands have been affected. People have spoken of four to five meter waves,” she said, adding that “people are hip-high in water.”
“Some houses have fallen over and other infrastructure has been hit, with one hospital destroyed,” she added.
Balpe said other Pacific nations, including the Solomon Islands and Kiribati — also allies of Taiwan — had also been hit.
“Kiribati has also had storm surges,” she said, with the main causeway on the islands badly damaged. “There’s basically one road on the islands and the bridge has been destroyed, which is seriously impacting transport.”
On the Solomon Islands, several houses were razed by landslides.
“It is unprecedented in terms of the number of places impacted, but we have not heard of casualties in the Solomons, Kiribati and Tuvalu at the moment,” Balpe said.
Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said Canberra was responding to a request from Tuvalu, one of the world’s smallest and most remote countries.
“Tuvalu has announced a state of emergency and we are responding to that request with basic supplies, water, sanitation, tents, blankets and food,” Bishop said in Perth, Australia. “In the case of Fiji, Solomon Islands and Kiribati, we understand assessments are being made. The impact is not as great, but we wait to hear.”
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has