Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez yesterday offered his condolences to people affected by the earthquake that struck Hualien County late on Tuesday.
“On behalf of all Honduran people, I extend my deepest sympathy to the people of Taiwan, especially the families affected by the earthquake. President Tsai [Ing-wen] (蔡英文), our sincere support to you,” Hernandez wrote in Spanish in a tweet.
Several foreign representatives to Taiwan also offered their condolences on Facebook, including American Institute (AIT) in Taiwan Director Kin Moy and British Representative to Taiwan Catherine Nettleton.
“On behalf of my American Institute in Taiwan family and my colleagues in the U.S. Government, I want to let all the people affected by the earthquake know that you are in our thoughts today,” Moy wrote on the AIT’s official Facebook page.
Lawmakers across party lines have jointly announced that they would suspend their election campaign events for one day to focus on helping people who affected by the magnitude 6 earthquake.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) and Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕), who are vying for the party’s Taichung mayoral nomination, announced that they have suspended all campaign events.
Lu said that the Hualien County Government asked her to announce that the county is busy coordinating disaster relief and to ask residents to refrain from visiting the county offices for personal business today.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Huang Wei-cher (黃偉哲) said that the current atmosphere is not appropriate for campaign events and he would be suspending all election-related events for several days.
DPP Legislator Pasuya Yao (姚文智) also canceled events in Taipei, where he was to canvass for support and hand out Lunar New year couplets.
Instead he met with his campaign team to discuss how to help Hualien residents affected by the earthquake.
Fast food chain McDonald's is to raise prices by up to NT$5 on some products at its restaurants across Taiwan, starting on Wednesday next week, the company announced today. The prices of all extra value meals and sharing boxes are to increase by NT$5, while breakfast combos and creamy corn soup would go up by NT$3, the company said in a statement. The price of the main items of those meals, if ordered individually, would remain the same. Meanwhile, the price of a medium-sized lemon iced tea and hot cappuccino would rise by NT$3, extra dipping sauces for chicken nuggets would go up
Yangmingshan National Park’s Qingtiangang (擎天崗) nature area has gone viral after a park livestream camera observed a couple in the throes of intimate congress, which was broadcast live on YouTube, drawing large late-night crowds and sparking a backlash over noise, bright lights and disruption to wildlife habitat. The area’s livestream footage appeared to show a couple engaging in sexual activity on a picnic table in the park on Friday last week, with the uncensored footage streamed publicly online. The footage quickly spread across social media, prompting a tide of visitors to travel to the site to “check in” and recreate the
Minister of Digital Affairs Lin Yi-ching (林宜敬) yesterday cited regulatory issues and national security concerns as an expert said that Taiwan is among the few Asian regions without Starlink. Lin made the remarks on Facebook after funP Innovation Group chief executive officer Nathan Chiu (邱繼弘) on Friday said Taiwan and four other countries in Asia — China, North Korea, Afghanistan and Syria — have no access to Starlink. Starlink has become available in 166 countries worldwide, including Ukraine, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, in the six years since it became commercial, he said. While China and North Korea block Starlink, Syria is not
GROUNDED: A KMT lawmaker proposed eliminating drone development programs and freezing funding for counterdrone systems, despite China’s adoption of the technology China has deployed attack drones at air bases near the Taiwan Strait in a strategy aimed at overwhelming Taiwan’s air defense systems through saturation attacks, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said. The council’s latest quarterly report on China said that satellite imagery and open-source intelligence indicate that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had converted retired J-6 fighter jets into J-6W drones, which the PLA has stationed at six air bases near Taiwan, five in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province. The report cited J. Michael Dahm, a senior fellow at the US-based Mitchell Institute, as saying that China has