DIPLOMACY
Sympathy sent for typhoon
The government has extended sympathy to Japan on the loss of life and the battering recently from Typhoon Wipha, Association of East Asian Relations Chairman Lee Chia-chin (李嘉進) said yesterday. Lee conveyed the sentiments in a letter to his counterpart, Mitsuo Ohashi, chairman of the Interchange Association, Japan. Lee expressed the hope that life would return to normal soon for Japanese in the areas affected by the typhoon. Wipha skirted the east coast of Japan on Wednesday, bringing heavy rainfall to the country and causing landslides. Izu Oshima recorded 22 deaths as a result of the storm and suffered the heaviest damage, according to the Japanese news organization NHK.
SOCIETY
Campaign fights violence
Education plays an important role in ending violence against women and girls, a US-based women’s rights group said yesterday. “Kids see and they imitate,” Zonta International president Lynn McKenzie said. “So what you want to do is say: ‘No.’” McKenzie is in Taiwan to attend a district meeting in Greater Kaohsiung over the weekend and to promote a campaign called “Zonta Says No.” The campaign, which began in November last year and runs through December, focuses on advocacy actions to prevent and end violence against women and girls worldwide. Asked about her views on the status of women worldwide, McKenzie said a lot more can be done, citing the slow growth of the percentage of female parliamentarians worldwide. Established in 1919, Zonta International now has about 300,000 members in 1,200 clubs in 65 countries all over the world. There are 18 Zonta clubs in Taiwan, with 560 members, the group 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
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