■ DIPLOMACY
MOFA reshuffles staff
A personnel reshuffle is in store for the nation's diplomatic missions overseas, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) official said last night. Representative to Greece Tung Kuo-yu (董國猷) will become the deputy representative to the US, as his knowledge of international organizations could help the country's bid to gain membership in such bodies, the official said. Thomas Chen (陳經銓), the deputy representative at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) in Canada, will become the director of TECO in San Francisco. Huang Ju-hou (黃諸侯), chief executive officer of the ministry's Committee on Japanese Affairs, will take over as director of TECO in Los Angeles.
■ MEDIA
GIO opens media center
A news center for foreign reporters covering the March 22 presidential election is up and running, a Government Information Office spokesman said yesterday, adding that more than 100 reporters had registered so far to cover the poll. Chi Tung-yang (紀東陽), a secretary at the Information and Liaison Office, said the news center would provide foreign media with better access to information about the election. "Various programs, such as meetings with the foreign minister and the chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council, will also be arranged by the center," he said. In 2004, around 680 foreign journalists covered the presidential election, including 130 reporters stationed in Taiwan. Pascal Liu (劉代光), head of the Information and Liaison Office, said he expected the number of foreign journalists covering this year's election to reach more than 700.
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