The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday condemned the Syrian government’s chemical attacks on its civilians and voiced its support for global sanctions against such crimes.
Asked about the airstrikes launched by the US, the UK and France on Syria following its suspected use of chemical weapons on civilians, ministry spokesman Andrew Lee (李憲章) said that Taiwan has always respected and protected human rights and democracy.
Taiwan strongly opposes and condemns any government that uses chemical weapons and other weapons of mass destruction to hurt innocent people and supports the international community’s adoption of necessary sanctions, Lee said.
Several agreements are in place that prohibit the use of chemical and biological weapons.
Taiwan has provided Syria and Jordan 50 prefabricated houses and five new, fully equipped mobile intensive care ambulances for refugees in the region displaced by the chaos from the ongoing civil war in Syria, the ministry said.
Taiwan is willing to continue to help promote stability and other humanitarian efforts in the area, the ministry added.
Separately yesterday, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) held a national security council where she exchanged opinions with high-ranking security officials on the latest developments in Syria and regional security issues.
Tsai told the Ministry of National Defense to boost monitoring of aerial and naval movements in Taiwan’s peripheral areas and safeguarding national security, as well as to react swiftly to false information to calm Taiwanese following China’s announcement of military exercise scheduled for Wednesday.
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