Perceived media freedom in Taiwan has been ranked 15th worldwide by Gallup Inc, with 84 percent of Taiwanese surveyed last year saying the news media in their country have a lot of freedom, according to the results of global surveys released by the US-based pollster.
That compares with 11 percent of respondents who gave a negative answer and 5 percent who said they did not know or declined to answer.
The nation’s perceived media freedom was ranked significantly higher than that of Japan and South Korea, where only 69 percent and 58 percent of people respectively said the news media in their countries had a lot of freedom.
The Netherlands, Finland and Germany were the three countries with the world’s highest perceived media freedom last year, with 95 percent, 94 percent and 93 percent of people in those countries respectively describing their media as free.
Others on the top 10 list were Denmark (92 percent), the UK (91 percent), Sweden (91 percent), New Zealand (91 percent), Senegal (90 percent), Austria (88 percent) and Australia (88 percent).
In 11th to 14th places were Ireland (87 percent), Canada (87 percent), Paraguay (86 percent) and the US (85 percent).
According to the surveys conducted across 132 countries, a median of 63 percent of adults polled said the news media in their countries had a lot of freedom, while a median of 26 percent said their media were not free.
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