■ CULTURE
Zoo to offer shuttle
Kaohsiung City’s Shoushan Zoo yesterday launched a free holiday shuttle bus service between its parking lot and its main entrance on a trial basis. The city government’s Economic Affairs Bureau, which supervises the zoo, said the service will continue throughout this month. The service is expected to offer parents holding babies or carrying baby strollers some relief during hot summer days as there is 500m between the parking lot and the entrance, the bureau said.
■ ENVIRONMENT
Group suggests new rituals
The Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation is urging the public to be more earth-friendly by changing some of their rituals during “ghost month” — the seventh month of the year on the lunar calendar. During this year’s “ghost month,” which runs from last Friday through Aug. 30, many residents will observe the time-honored tradition of offering sacrifices and burning incense and ghost paper money to appease the wandering spirits. In an appeal posted on its Web site, the Tzu Chi foundation urged people observing the festival not to burn ghost money — a practice that causes air pollution and harms human health. It called on people to donate the funds originally intended for burning ghost money to charities and use flowers and fruit in lieu of animal sacrifices for their worship rituals.
■ SOCIETY
‘Model father’ shares story
Lin Liang-chun (林良存), 69, a fisherman from the remote Niaoyu islet (鳥嶼) in Penghu County, beamed with joy after being honored as a “model father” on Saturday, but expressions of sadness still flashed across his wrinkled face when he reflected on the life of an old fisherman. A resident of Niaoyu since birth, Lin said there was once a time when local fishermen could always depend on a good catch of silver herring. Now the area’s fish resources seemed exhausted as the size of local catches were slumping badly, he said. This year, fishermen caught no fish at all in the traditional silver herring season last month, he said. Without fish to catch and with constant hikes in fuel prices, Lin said, he has seldom ventured out on his fishing boat over the past few months and has survived on the NT$6,000 monthly pension he receives from the government. Despite his hardships, Lin received the honor for raising four children on limited means. He now hopes that the government will understand the difficult life he and other fishermen face and take better care of them in the future.
■ POLITICS
Dissidents deported
Two overseas Chinese dissidents who traveled to Hong Kong on Saturday to push for political reform in China ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games were denied entry and deported to Taiwan late on Saturday night. Pan Qing (潘晴), chairman of the Chinese Liberal Democratic Party, and Qin Jin (秦晉), vice chairman of the Federation for a Democratic China, arrived in Taiwan a few days ago to visit friends and then flew to Hong Kong on Saturday to join a protest march scheduled for Wednesday. But when Pan, a citizen of New Zealand, and Qin, a citizen of Australia, arrived in Hong Kong on a morning flight from Taiwan, they were denied entry by immigration authorities for violating Hong Kong’s Immigration Ordinance. They were put on a flight bound for Taipei. The pair said they had planned to call for an end to one-party rule in China and push for economic reforms and social security. They said they would hold activities in Taiwan instead.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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