No Taiwanese were injured or killed in the terror attack outside the British parliament on Wednesday, the ministries of foreign affairs and education and the Tourism Bureau said yesterday.
All 177 Taiwanese tourists currently in London are safe, including 68 on tours with Lion Travel Service Co, 77 with South East Travel Service Co and 32 with Comfort Travel Service, the bureau said.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has not changed the status of is travel alert for the UK, which remains gray, the lowest level on the ministry’s four-color alert system.
Gray means that tourists should be aware of their surroundings and heed their own safety.
The ministry also said that Taiwan’s representative office in London had activated an emergency plan to ensure the safety of Taiwanese expatriates and students in the UK, adding it is maintaining close contact with the British government.
The Ministry of Education said that there are 3,920 Taiwanese students studying in Britain, with about 2,000 in the Greater London area.
Lion Travel Service general manager Andy Yu (游國珍) said that some of the popular tourist attractions in central London, including the Tower Bridge, Westminster Abbey, the Elizabeth Tower and the Palace of Westminster, have been closed to the public following the attack and it is not clear how long these destinations would remain closed.
Lion has a tour group arriving in London today, and if those sites remain closed, the agency might consider changing the group’s itinerary, Yu said, adding that the agency is closely monitoring the situation in London.
The company has 245 more tourists set to leave for UK tours in the next six days and so far no one has asked to cancel their trip, he said.
Sales of tours to the UK have risen fourfold this year compared to the same time last year due to a decline in the British pound, he 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
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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