EARTHQUAKE
No Taiwanese injured
No Taiwanese have been reported injured in a magnitude 8.1 earthquake off the coast of southern Mexico, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Eleanor Wang (王珮玲) said yesterday after checking with the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Mexico. The Tourism Bureau also reported that no Taiwanese tour groups in Mexico have been affected. The bureau confirmed with various local travel agencies that Chiapas, which is nearest to the quake’s epicenter, is not a region to which they have sent tour groups. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said the earthquake occurred at 12:49pm Taiwan time yesterday off the coast of Chiapas. Tsunami warnings were issued in Mexico following the massive earthquake, which was felt as far away as Mexico City, which lies far to the north of the quake’s epicenter.
TRAVEL
Travel warning on Myanmar
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday issued a red travel advisory for Myanmar’s Rakhine State, following rebel attacks on police stations in the area. The attacks caused 89 deaths, the ministry said, urging Taiwanese to avoid or quickly leave the area. Orange travel advisories have also been issued for Kachin, Shan and Kayin states, the ministry’s Web site showed, advising Taiwanese to only travel to these areas if absolutely necessary. The rest of Myanmar has been placed under a yellow travel advisory, which urges Taiwanese to reconsider their travel plans, or if traveling to the area, to exercise a high degree of caution. Tension in the region has risen due to a series of conflicts between Rohingya Muslims and ethnic Rakhines, in which whole villages have been destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people displaced.
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