A group of Taiwanese college and graduate students traveled to Japan yesterday, to learn about the country’s reconstruction efforts following a devastating earthquake and tsunami in 2011, a Japanese news agency said.
The 100 university students will attend a presentation in Tokyo on post-disaster reconstruction before visiting Miyagi Prefecture, which was hit hard by the magnitude 9 earthquake on March 11, 2011, Japan’s Interchange Association said in a recent statement.
During their 14-day trip, the students will meet with Japanese counterparts to discuss issues such as how to limit the impact of natural disasters, given that Japan and Taiwan are both earthquake-prone areas, the association said.
The students will live with Japanese host families to learn more about local culture, it said, adding that they will be separated into four groups in Aichi, Gifu, Kyoto and Nara prefectures.
The students’ trip is part of a program sponsored by the Japanese government to thank Taiwan for its rescue assistance and donations after the 2011 disaster, said the association, which represents Japanese interests in Taiwan in the absence of diplomatic ties between the two countries.
Taiwan donated US$260 million in relief and reconstruction aid to Japan, more any other country in the world.
Under the program, 319 Taiwanese students have been invited to Japan, while a group of 30 Japanese are to visit Taiwan in March to mark the second anniversary of the earthquake, the association said.
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