Taiwan yesterday decided to issue US$10,000 in aid to its Pacific diplomatic ally Solomon Islands in the wake of a savage cyclone that hit two remote islands in the country last weekend.
"We decided to grant US$10,000 of humanitarian aid to the country to express the concerns of our government and people towards our ally," said Peter Cheng (鄭博久), director general of the foreign ministry's department of East Asian and Pacific affairs.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Eugene Chien (簡又新) yesterday approved suggestions made by Teng Pei-yin (鄧備殷), Taiwan's representative to the Solomon Islands, in his telegram with regards to the amount of aid to the country, Cheng said.
The aid came at a time when the debt-stricken Pacific state struggled to finance a large-scale rescue and relief operation in the wake of the devastating storms last Saturday.
Cyclone Zoe on Saturday hit the islands of Tikopia and Anuta, two of the most remote islets in the Solomon Islands chains, although the damage remained unknown due to the delay in relief and rescue operations.
The cyclone, believed to be the most powerful Pacific storms on record, blasted the islets with winds estimated to have reached 350kph.
A ship carrying aid departed the Solomon Islands capital Honiara on Thursday and is expected to reach the two isles -- with an estimated population of around 3,700 -- today, related reports quoted coordinators in Honiara as saying.
A second relief boat was slated to leave yesterday.
A civil war has torn the nation apart. Back in August, Taiwan issued a US$1 million check to the country's prime minister in the wake of the chaos in Honiara.
The police then erected razor-wire barricades around the prime minister's office and the finance department because the country was facing bankruptcy.
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