DIPLOMACY
Kin Moy posts farewell video
Former American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) director Kin Moy, who served in the position for three years, left a final farewell message to Taiwan on Facebook before heading back to the US with his family yesterday. Moy was unable to give interviews just before leaving Taiwan, but posted a video showing images of him and his family making their way to the airport, as well as photos and videos about Moy’s life in Taiwan. In the video, Moy said he recalled saying when he first came to Taiwan that the next years would be a crucial period for Taiwan-US relations. He said he was proud of how much has been achieved through the efforts of Americans and Taiwanese. Moy, 52, arrived in Taiwan in June 2015 and was the first AIT director of Asian heritage. Moy’s position is to be taken over in late August by Brent Christensen, a former AIT deputy director and seasoned diplomat with extensive experience in the region.
EARTHQUAKES
Magnitude 4.5 hits Taitung
A magnitude 4.5 quake struck eastern Taiwan at 2:32am yesterday, the Central Weather Bureau said. No damage or casualties were reported. The epicenter of the earthquake was about 24.8km north of Taitung County Hall at a depth of 8.1km, the bureau’s Seismology Center said. The earthquake’s intensity, which gauges the actual effect of a temblor, was highest in Taitung’s Chihshang Township (池上), where it measured 4 on Taiwan’s seven-tier intensity scale. On Wednesday, a magnitude 4.3 earthquake rocked southern Taiwan at 8:41pm. The epicenter was about 6.5km northwest of Tainan City Hall at a depth of 5.6km, with the highest intensity recorded in the city’s Yongkang District (永康), where it reached five on the intensity scale, the bureau said.
TOURISM
More visit Vietnam
Taiwanese made 338,956 visits to Vietnam in the first half of the year, 13.8 percent more than in the same period last year, Vietnamese National Administration of Tourism statistics showed. Taiwanese were the fifth-largest group of visitors to the country in the six-month period. In June alone, Taiwanese visited Vietnam 55,406 times, the statistics showed. Chinese were the biggest group, with nearly 2.57 million visits. They were followed by South Koreans and Japanese travelers, who made 1.71 million and 400,000 visits respectively. Vietnam aims to attract 15.5 million foreign visitors and 78 million domestic trippers this year to achieve tourism turnover of about US$26.8 billion, the agency said.
RAILWAYS
Man dies after 12.5m fall
A passenger fell to his death from a 12.5m-high platform at the Tainan High-Speed Rail Station on Friday in the first such accident in the high-speed railway’s history. Rescue workers arrived at the scene to find that the man displayed no vital signs. The man fell onto a pedestrian walkway in the station’s parking lot. The 21-year-old victim, surnamed Huang (黃), purchased a ticket from Tainan to Chiayi, but fell from the northbound platform onto the road below, investigators said. The barrier around the platform is 1.23m high and not easy for an adult to accidentally topple over, police said. One witness told police that he saw Huang climb the barrier and sit on it before falling. Huang’s father told police that his son had not mentioned any suicidal thoughts and had not shown any unusual behavior.
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
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
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