DIPLOMACY
Nation aids Syrian refugees
Taiwan has extended a helping hand to Syrian refugees who have fled to Jordan to escape the civil war in their country, Teng Sheng-ping (鄧盛平), assistant director-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Department of West Asian and African Affairs, said yesterday. The ministry has donated two ambulances and 50 temporary housing units worth US$110,000 to help Jordan take care of the Syrian refugees at the request of the Jordanian government, Teng said. The Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation has also donated 190,000 second-hand garments, which the ministry has helped deliver to Jordan, he said. The civil war in Syria has left about 70,000 people dead or missing and has caused 600,000 to flee to neighboring countries, the ministry said.
LEISURE
TV taking a back seat
Television is no longer just something people watch, but becoming something people listen to as well, Internet search giant Google said. According to Google Taiwan, many people turn on their smartphones, tablets or laptops while watching TV, with their eyes constantly moving from screen to screen. In Taiwan, many people have the TV on as background and only pay attention to the screen when they hear things that interest them. Moreover, 79 percent of the mobile Internet users also search the Web after watching TV. Google Taiwan general manager Stanley Chen (陳俊廷) said that using the Internet to watch TV has also become a trend. He cited last year’s London Olympics as an example, saying that 10 percent of the network traffic related to the Games came from cellphone networks. Many also use YouTube to watch TV content, with the YouTube cellphone view rate growing by three times last year from the previous year.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: