■ TRANSPORTATION
City to offer travel card
Kaohsiung City's Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) Bureau plans to issue a travel card at the end of this month to offer a range of preferential services, with the aim of boosting ridership, bureau director-general Chen Kai-ling (陳凱凌) said yesterday. The city government will use its air pollution control fund to finance the card, which can be used to pay for travel by air, train, bus, MRT and ferry, Chen said. If cardholders make good use of the various special offers that will come with the card, they will be able to enjoy discounts of up to 40 percent on Kaohsiung MRT fares, compared with the 15 percent discount offered to I-Pass holders. The MRT bureau will target mainly corporate commuters, Chen said, adding that employees who apply for the card through their companies will get the best discounts for travel on the MRT. In addition, for each NT$200 put on the stored value card by consumers, the city will add NT$50, Chen said.
■ POLITICS
DPP drafts policy guidelines
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said its planned “10-year policy guidelines” are not intended to replace the party's political platform but address the challenges the nation will face over the coming decade. Liu Chien-sin (劉建忻), deputy executive director of the DPP's Policy Research and Coordination Committee, said the platform is an outline of the DPP's basic policy position, while the “10-year policy guidelines” will offer flexible strategies to resolve problems facing the country. The party will unveil its first-ever “guidelines” at its national congress in August, he said. The party will hold four seminars over the coming weeks to solicit expert opinion in drafting the guidelines, he added. These will take place on Sunday, April 22, April 24 and May 2 and address four different topics — Taiwan's aging population, the next wave of ecological disasters, new economic development strategies for Taiwan in the face of globalization and Taiwan's strategy amid a fluid international situation.
■ EDUCATION
Ma, Harvard to hold talks
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) will hold a video conference with faculty and students from his alma mater, Harvard University, today, to talk about Taiwan's democracy, economy, foreign policy and cross-strait relations. During the conference call, Ma will also answer questions raised by participants on the development of cross-strait relations and those between Taipei and Washington. US academics taking part in the discussion will include William Kirby, director of Harvard University’s Fairbank
Center for Chinese Studies; Steven Goldstein, head of the center’s Taiwan research pane; and professors William Alford and David Wang. Former National Security Council secretary-general Su Chi (蘇起), who left for the US last week, will take part in the conference that will begin at 7:30am Taiwan time.
■ TOURISM
Keelung hosts cruise ship
More than 3,800 passengers aboard a luxury cruise liner arrived in Keelung Harbor yesterday, the largest number ever to arrive at the port aboard a single ship, Keelung Harbor Bureau said. The Bermuda-registered Diamond Princess, carrying 2,725 tourists — mostly from Europe and the US — and 1,100 crewmembers, was scheduled to leave for Hong Kong early that same evening, the bureau said. Upon arriving the tourists were greeted by 60 tour buses that whisked them away on a one-day tour of northern Taiwan.
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