A Taiwanese teenager described the nation’s exclusion from the WHO as a form of discrimination amid the COVID-19 pandemic in a program by Japanese public broadcaster NHK.
In the one-hour online program Beyond Pandemic: Voices of Youths From Around the World, aired yesterday in Taiwan by the Public Television Service, 16 teenagers from eight countries and territories were invited to record videos of their thoughts and share them on a wide range of topics.
“Taiwan is not a WHO member, so I feel that Taiwan has been ignored and discriminated against,” said Stacy Hua (花湧惠), a 16-year-old student from New Taipei City Municipal Banciao Senior High School.
“All countries must be treated equally and should not be isolated. I hope that we can see no more discrimination,” she said, adding that sickness has no borders.
Hua also discussed how Taiwan, as is the case with several other nations, has had to deal with a barrage of “fake news” and inaccurate information on the Internet in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing for example online information that led to people hoarding toilet paper.
Also taking part in the program was Buya Watan, a student from Nan Oau Senior High School in Yilan County, who talked about his daily life as an Aborigine.
Buya, a member of the Atayal community, won the award for best youth television program host at the 55th Golden Bell Awards in September.
Three other teenagers from Brazil, Argentina and the US also spoke about gender inequality and racial discrimination.
The program is a two-part series and features teenagers from Taiwan, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Germany, Japan, Mongolia and the US.
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