■ Earthquake
Tremors rattle east coast
Two earthquakes measuring 5.9 and 4.8 on the Richter scale rocked Taiwan yesterday, rattling high-rise buildings across the nation, the Seismology Center said. There were no immediate reports of damage or casualties. The bigger quake struck at 4:18am Friday, with an epicenter in the sea 43km east of Taitung county. It originated 9.4km underground. The second tremor hit at 5:19am with an epicenter 37.2km east of Hualien county. Its origin was 23km underground.
■ Literacy
Children visit book exhibit
Thousands of children and teenagers braved the cold weather yesterday to visit the Taipei World Trade Center for the13th Taipei International Book Exhibition to browse displays of comic books from domestic and foreign publishers. With long queues building up before the opening of the exhibition , the comic books hall became jam-packed by the afternoon, according the private Taipei Book Fair Foundation. The annual event spotlights a series of exhibitions and discussions that mirror reading activities and trends in the Asia-Pacific region, with this year's show focusing on "book art" and "digital publishing." The exhibition concludes today.
■ Society
Lawmaker gives to the blind
The nation's representative to Russia presented Friday a donation from former legislator Apollo Chen (陳學聖) to a branch of the Russian Blind Association in Moscow. Chen Jung-chie (陳榮傑), representative of the Taipei-Moscow Economic and Cultural Coordination Commission, said it was the seventh time that the former legislator had extended his help to the blind association in Moscow. The donation, worth US$1,000, is expected to benefit roughly 50 of the more than 700 visually impaired people at the association's Lomonosov branch, Chen added. The director of the Lomonosov branch attended the donation ceremony and expressed gratitude for the money and for assistance from the Taiwan representative office over the years.
■ Trade
Customs seminar to be held
The nation is set to hold a trade facilitation seminar next month to share its automation experience in dealing with customs operations with other countries, the Board of Foreign Trade (BOFT) announced yesterday. The BOFT said Taiwan has engaged in talks on trade facilitation issues raised by the WTO and put them on the agenda of the multilateral Doha Round of trade negotiations. It also said that trade facilitation is aimed at promoting international trade by simplifying import and export procedures, particularly customs clearance procedures of WTO members. Despite the fact that the issues have been included on the agenda of the new round of multilateral trade talks, the BOFT said that the developing and least developed countries are worried that they will not be capable of carrying out future decisions of the talks. Saying that the government has worked on the elimination of barriers and that suggestions it has raised at the Doha talks were welcomed by other WTO members, the BOFT said that it will invite developing and least developed countries to attend the seminar.
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