■ DIPLOMACY
St. Kitts embassy set to open
After nearly two months of preparations, the embassy of St. Kitts and Nevis in Taiwan is set to open next Monday, diplomatic sources said on Monday. Sources said Minister of Foreign Affairs James Huang (黃志芳) will attend the opening ceremony and congratulate Jasmine Huggins, who will serve as the charge d'affaires in Taiwan. Huggins traveled to Taiwan on Dec. 4 with St. Kitts and Nevis Foreign Affairs Minister Timothy Harris to prepare for the opening of the embassy. Taiwan established diplomatic relations with the Caribbean country in October 1983.
■ ENVIRONMENT
Official fights for butterflies
Kaohsiung County Commissioner Yang Chiu-hsing (楊秋興) said on Monday that as valleys in the county's Maolin Township (茂林) and Mexico are the only locations in the world that serve as mass wintering sites for butterflies, he would push for city sisterhood ties between the two regions to jointly protect their unique natural resources. Yang made the announcement during an inspection tour of a purple crow butterfly observation path in the Maolin National Scenic Area. A volunteer tour guide said that Mexican President Felipe Calderon had launched measures to enhance the protection of monarch butterfly reserves in the country. In comparison, wintering sites for purple crow butterflies in the county's Maolin and Liouguei (六龜) townships and Taitung County are merely under the protection of local governments, the volunteer said, while advising Yang to consider forging ties with the Mexican city that has the highest concentration of butterflies over the winter.
■ CRIME
Caution urged in Ivory Coast
Taiwanese officials in Ivory Coast have reminded Taiwanese businesses to first collect and assess credit information on companies in West Africa before doing business with them to avoid being swindled, a spokesman for the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Ministry officials stationed in Ivory Coast issued the warning in the face of an increasing number of Taiwanese enterprises that have allegedly fallen victim to trade fraud committed by companies operating in West Africa, the spokesman said. In many of the cases, official documents and contracts were written in French. The officials urged Taiwanese companies to be especially cautious when documents are written in languages other than English. Fraud rings often place large orders with local suppliers using shell companies to lure them into advancing relatively small sums of money, the spokesman cited the ministry officials as warning.
■ HEALTH
Hikers warned on chiggers
Health authorities in Nantou County yesterday reminded hikers in mountainous areas and grasslands to take precautions against chigger mites after nine suspected cases of scrub typhus were reported. Bureau of Health officials said one of the cases has been confirmed. Scrub typhus is an acute infectious disease caused by the bite of chiggers carrying Rickettsia tsutsugamushi. The mites are found in warm areas of heavy scrub vegetation where their hosts are wild rodents. Officials said that scrub typhus is found in tropical and sub-tropical areas of Asia. Its symptoms include fever, headache, sweating, swollen lymph nodes and congestive conjunctiva. The incubation period lasts six to 21 days. Antibiotics can reduce the risk of mortality to less than 1 percent, but without treatment the mortality rate may rise to 60 percent.
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
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
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