■ Diplomacy
Visa features Taipei 101
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday said it has changed the appearance of visitor visas to include the Taipei landmark and world's tallest building Taipei 101. "Starting Jan. 11 this year, Taiwan's overseas consular offices have started issuing the new version of the visa in which the Taipei 101 is the background picture," ministry spokesman Michel Lu (呂慶龍) said. The new visa design replaces one featuring the black-faced spoonbill, Lu said.
PHOTO: CNA
■ Defense
New AAV-7s deployed
Taiwan has deployed 54 US-made assault amphibious vehicles (AAV-7) to boost its defenses against a possible attack from China, the Chinese-language China Times reported yesterday. The report said Taiwan took delivery of the AAV-7s at the end of last year and has deployed them in the south and around Taipei, the paper said. US military officers are in Taiwan to train the Marine Corps how to use AAV-7s. The amphibious landing vehicles will be commissioned next month, the paper said. The US approved the NT$6.1 billion (US$185 million) sale of 54 AAV-7s to Taiwan in 2002. The AAV-7 can carry 18 armed soldiers at 13kph on water and 25kph to 35kph on land. They have a combat radius of 500km. In the Iraq war, US Marines used the AAV-7s to charge into Baghdad.
■ Protests
Falun Gong protest in Taipei
The Falun Gong-backed Epoch Times newspaper launched a one-week relay hunger strike yesterday outside the second exhibition hall of the Taipei World Trade Center to protest recent violent actions taken against members of their group by the Chinese authorities. The relay hunger strike began earlier this month in North America, with similar protests being held by Falun Gong practitioners in Hong Kong, Macau and Malaysia. A spokeswoman for the newspaper said Lee Yuan, an Epoch Times computer engineer in the US, was seriously beaten on Feb. 8 in his Atlanta, Georgia, apartment by Chinese agents, who also destroyed computer equipment with which he had maintained the newspaper's Web site. Lee had reportedly succeeded in bypassing Internet restrictions in China to publicize the number of members the paper claims left the Chinese Communist Party. The newspaper said 8 million members have resigned from the party since December 2004. However, the names of the people involved are not published, just a serial number.
■ Society
Lu rallies female officials
Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) yesterday said that society faces three major problems -- an aging population, gender imbalance and declining rate of marriage -- and that she was forming an association for female elected representatives to help solve the problems. Lu made the remarks at a tea party held for female elected officials at the Presidential Office yesterday afternoon. Lu said there are more men than women, citing statistics showing the man to woman ratio is 110 to 100. Lu said that she was happy to see eight women in the Cabinet, 47 female lawmakers, a female county commissioner. a female mayor and 233 women elected to county and city council seats in last December's local elections.
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