The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been communicating with Canberra about Australia’s needs for relief aid amid massive bushfires, and its preliminary plan is to donate about 100,000 surgical masks, ministry spokeswoman Joanne Ou (歐江安) said yesterday.
The bushfires continue to rage across southeast Australia, killing scores of animals and causing serious damage to property, Ou told a news briefing in Taipei, adding that people traveling to the country should beware of air pollution.
Asked what aid Taiwan would provide to Australia, she said that the government plans to donate 100,000 masks, but added that the exact number and type have not been confirmed, as it is still gathering information about the country’s needs.
Photo: CNA
As masks are considered medical products in Australia, the ministry would need to follow local regulations when making the donation, she said.
The Australian Office in Taipei has also provided a list of several organizations that could receive donations for the bushfires, she added.
In related news, the Department of Latin American and Caribbean Affairs said that the ministry would donate 20,200 tonnes of rice to Haiti, up from 8,600 tonnes donated last year, as the Caribbean ally faces a food crisis amid social unrest.
After filing an application with the Council of Agriculture, the ministry would next month arrange the shipment of rice to the island country, department Deputy Director-General Silvia Liu (劉聿綺) said.
Due to an ongoing conflict between its ruling and opposition parties, the Haitian parliament on Monday stopped operations and the country’s affairs are being temporarily run by administrative orders, she 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
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