Taiwan is closely following developments in Burkina Faso, one of its African diplomatic allies, after the nation’s presidential guard burst into a Cabinet meeting and took the interim president and prime minister hostage on Wednesday, a foreign ministry spokesperson said yesterday.
“We have called for our nationals living in Burkina Faso to pay extra attention to personal safety and we will continue to closely watch developments in the country,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Eleanor Wang (王珮玲) said.
She said the motives of the guards who seized the interim leaders were not clear.
“The Republic of China government hopes the incident ends peacefully as soon as possible,” she added.
Burkinabe Prime Minister Isaac Zida and Burkinabe Interim President Michel Kafando were detained by guards supporting ousted former Burkinabe president Blaise Compaore at the presidential palace in the capital, Ouagadougou, on Wednesday.
The incident came less than a month before an election that is due to complete a transition back to democracy after Compaore was forced out of office by violent mass protests in October last year, when he attempted to change the constitution to prolong his 27 years in office.
Burkina Faso’s military yesterday said it had stripped Kafando of his functions and dissolved the government, seizing power in a coup.
“The patriotic forces, grouped together in the National Council for Democracy, have decided today to put an end to the deviant transitional regime,” a military official said on RTB state television.
“The transition has progressively distanced itself from the objectives of refounding our democracy,” he said, adding that a revision of electoral law that blocked Compaore’s supporters from running in the planned Oct. 11 election had “created divisions and frustrations amongst the people.”
The apparent coup — which was condemned by the UN, the US government and former colonial power France — has dampened hopes of a smooth transition in Burkina Faso, which became a beacon for democratic aspirations in Africa after protesters ousted Compaore.
Soldiers yesterday fired warning shots to disperse a crowd of more than 100 people gathered in Independence Square in Ouagadougou to protest against the presidential guard, a witness 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