DIPLOMACY
Extradition treaty passed
The legislature yesterday approved an extradition treaty with the Marshall Islands. The treaty, which was signed in April, makes provisions for extradition from both countries in cases of offenses that are punishable by imprisonment of one year or more. Political crimes are exempt. Taiwan has extradition treaties with four other diplomatic allies: Paraguay, Swaziland, the Dominican Republic and St Vincent and the Grenadines.
TOURISM
Kenting most visited park
Kenting National Park in Pingtung County was the most-visited national park in the country, accounting for 34.2 percent of the 13.05 million tourists that visited national parks in the first nine months of the year, the Construction and Planning Agency said. Meanwhile, Kinmen National Park saw the largest increase in tourist numbers — nearly doubling from the same period last year — among the nation’s parks. The agency attributed the increase to the growing number of Chinese tourists visiting Kinmen Island.
ASTRONOMY
Meteor show may be muted
Ten years after a great Leonid meteor shower, skygazers are anticipating another dazzling display this week, but it might be muted by excessive moonlight, the Taipei Astronomical Museum said yesterday. The meteor shower will last from late tomorrow evening to Friday morning, producing 20 meteors per hour. However, there will also be a waning moon that could lessen the number of visible Leonid meteors to an average of two per hour, the museum said. In 2001, when the Leonid meteor shower reached its peak, people flocked to the mountains to witness the spectacle of a meteor rate of thousands per hour.
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