TOURISM
Cruise passenger visitors up
Nearly 460,000 cruise passengers visited Taiwan in the first half of this year and the number could reach 778,000 this year, up 7.76 percent from last year, according to a report published by the Taiwan International Ports Corp. The number of visitors was 326,000 in 2012, rising to 548,000 in 2013, the report showed. It is estimated that 2.2 million Asian cruise passengers are to visit this year, accounting for 9.87 percent of the 22.3 million global cruise market, an increase from 19 million passengers worldwide in 2010, the report said. Keelung in northern Taiwan is the fifth-largest cruise harbor in Asia, behind Singapore, Jeju Island in South Korea, Hong Kong and Shanghai respectively, with 52 cruise ships operated by 26 cruise operators in Asia, according to the report. Of the cruise ships that visit Taiwan, 76 percent travel between Taiwan and China, 15 percent to and from Japan and 9 percent Europe, the report showed.
SOCIETY
Public road museum to open
The nation’s first public roads museum is to open to visitors today. The Directorate-General of Highways (DGH) said the museum, located on the first floor of its new headquarters in western Taipei, would provide visitors with free access to the history and development of Taiwan’s highways and bridges. The museum consists of three sections: a permanent exhibition, special exhibitions and a reading room. The museum employs multimedia materials to create an interactive environment. The permanent exhibition covers the chronology of the DGH since its establishment and the development of the nation’s roads. Highlights include archives about the MacArthur Thruway connecting Taipei and the northern port city of Keelung, the east-west cross-island highway and the Siluo Bridge in central Taiwan. The museum is also to display a variety of restored documents from 1947 to 1948 in the first special exhibition, which is to run from Sept. 1 through Sept. 18.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Majorenko named EETO head
EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini has announced the appointment of Madeleine Majorenko as head of the European Economic and Trade Office (EETO) in Taiwan, starting next month. EETO director Frederic Laplanche is to return to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the end of this month, the EU representative office in Taiwan said in a statement released on Friday last week. Majorenko joined the Directorate-General for External Relations in 2005 and was appointed deputy head of the Unit for Relations with Eastern Europe and South Caucasus, and was the head of the Unit for European Neighbourhood Policy in the European External Action Service in 2009, a post she currently holds.
DIPLOMACY
Rice donation praised
Taiwan’s regular donation of rice to the US-based Food for the Poor’s relief project in Haiti has won the international relief organization’s acclaim, with Taiwan’s food aid said to have helped save tens of hundreds of Haitian people living in poverty. Ambassador to Haiti Peter Hwang (黃再求) said on Saturday that, since 2008, the Taiwanese government has donated 2,400 tonnes of rice each year to Food for the Poor under a cooperative program aimed at supplying food to 15,000 poverty-stricken households in Haiti for four consecutive months per year. Haitians are “genuinely very grateful to Taiwan” for being able to eat freshly cooked rice, Hwang 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