TOURISM
Taiwanese flock to Japan
Taiwanese made up the largest number of foreign visitors to Japan in the first half of the year, figures released by the Japan National Tourist Organization on Wednesday showed. Of the record high 6.26 million visitors to Japan in the first six months of the year, 1,391,000 came from Taiwan, up 35.1 percent from the previous year, the government-run agency said. South Korea ranked second with 1,276,000 visitors, down 3.3 percent from last year, it added. China was the third-largest source of foreign visitors with 1,009,200, up by 88.25 percent. Overall, visitor numbers rose by 1.3 million from the first half of last year, which analysts attributed to the yen’s depreciation and increased flights to Tokyo’s Haneda airport. Considering the growth in the first half, the total number of international visitors to Japan for the whole year is likely to reach 12 million, the Japan Tourism Agency said.
DIPLOMACY
Spensley to head AIT center
The American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) yesterday said that Alys Spensley had begun her tenure as cultural affairs officer in the Public Diplomacy Section. Spensley concurrently serves as director of the AIT’s American Center, succeeding Robert Ryan, it added. She is responsible for strengthening educational and cultural ties between the US and Taiwan. Spensley previously served in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs as a staff assistant, and as policy and coordination officer in the US Department of State’s Office of Public Diplomacy from 2011 to last year. Prior to that, she served as cultural affairs officer and 2010 expo liaison officer in Shanghai, and was stationed at the US embassy in Kathmandu, Nepal. Spensley previously worked as a financial analyst and conducted research in China’s Yunnan Province.
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