■ DIPLOMACY
Brazil resumes visa issuance
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday that Taiwanese passport holders could once again travel to Brazil as the Latin American country had resumed issuing tourist visas to Taiwanese. Ministry spokeswoman Phoebe Yeh (葉非比) said that for security reasons, Brazil had restricted the number of tourist visas it issued during the country's peak travel season. "The restriction did not target Taiwan or any specific country. It was purely a mechanism for Brazil to increase security during the Carnival season and was not politically motivated," she said. Yeh said the Brazilian representative office in Taiwan was expected to resume its visa service for Taiwanese in the next two weeks.
■ HEALTH
Malaria case reported
Health officials confirmed yesterday that a man in Taoyuan County had contracted malaria during a business trip to South Africa, making it this year's first imported case of the disease. Taoyuan health officials said the 49-year-old man was in South Africa from Nov. 11 until Jan. 8. Symptoms of the infection appeared on Jan. 20. The man checked into a hospital on Tuesday, whereupon the Centers for Disease Control confirmed he had malaria. Lin Hsueh-jung (林雪蓉), director of the Taoyuan County Government's Department of Health, said in recent years Taiwan had registered an average of 25 imported cases of malaria every year. Two cases were recorded in Taoyuan last year.
■ ECOLOGY
NTOU holds seminar
Keelung City's National Taiwan Ocean University (NTOU) will host a seminar on wildlife and biodiversity on Monday and Tuesday. About 600 participants are expected at the event, which will feature 216 presentations on research programs, a university spokesman said yesterday. The annual event, which began in the 1980s, is one of the most significant conferences on animal behavior and ecology research in Taiwan, the spokesman said. Referring to Taiwan as an island of rich natural resources endowed with diverse forests and wild animals, the spokesman said the seminar would advance the nation's wildlife studies by promoting conservation and supporting research. A student thesis competition will be held to encourage students to undertake wildlife research.
■ EDUCATION
KNU inks ties with MIT
Taoyuan County's Kainan University (KNU) has signed an eight-year cooperative agreement with the US-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to boost bilateral academic exchanges, KNU president Kao An-pang (高安邦) announced yesterday. The agreement made KNU the nation's only privately run university to have academic ties with MIT. Under the accord, KNU will collaborate with MIT to co-organize international symposiums at KNU and conduct faculty and student exchanges, Kao said. Under the agreement, KNU will select two academically outstanding students who have scored above 600 on the paper-based versions of the TOEFL exam to take courses each year at MIT, he said. MIT will open three fields of study to KNU students, including a mass media forum, comparative media studies and literature research. KNU, which already has a dual degree program with Waseda University in Japan, is seeking academic agreements with prestigious Ivy League US universities, including Brown University in Boston.
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