■ CULTURE
Local art shown in Argentina
A Taiwanese photography exhibition opened in Buenos Aires last week, allowing museum-goers in the South American country to get a taste of Taiwan’s culture and art. “Expo Taiwan Sublime” runs through Sept. 12 at the city’s Children’s Museum and features 40 works from Taiwanese photographers. Also displayed are Aboriginal crafts and ceramics provided by Taipei County’s Yingge Ceramics Museum. Mariana Elsztain, president of the museum, said the event would help Argentines better understand Taiwanese culture. She also expressed hope that her museum could hold more exhibitions with Taiwan in the future.
■ SOCIETY
Money wins out over love
Given a choice between love or money, 65 percent of Taiwanese office workers said money is more important, according to an online survey published yesterday, two days ahead of Chinese Lovers’ Day (七夕, or qixi). Qixi falls on the seventh day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar, which is tomorrow this year. In the survey by online manpower agency 360d that asked about office workers’ attitudes toward love and earning a crust, 44 percent said they often dream about finding a rich lover so they would not need to work for a living. The survey found that 26 percent of office workers said they had experienced an office romance. When selecting a spouse, 39 percent of respondents said they care most about whether the person is considerate enough, while 28 percent said they were most concerned about the person’s finances and sense of responsibility. The job bank carried out the survey from Aug. 1 to Aug. 10 and collected 1,245 valid responses.
■ AGRICULTURE
Goat sales to resume soon
The auctioning of goats at markets in Changhua and Yunlin counties is likely to resume before Aug. 31 after a successful nationwide inoculation against goat pox virus (GPV), according to Council of Agriculture officials. The massive GPV outbreak, which began with a case reported in Yunlin on April 9, has been effectively controlled by the inoculations launched on June 22, said Huang Kuo-ching (黃國青), deputy director of the Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine. The bureau said 225,159 goats in the country, or 99 percent of the goat population, had been vaccinated as of Thursday. The number of affected goat farms declined from 98 early last month to 32 this month, it added.
■ AGRICULTURE
Farmers angry at macaques
Fruit farmers from Chaishan (柴山) said they have suffered massive losses from macaques raiding their orchards. The monkeys often destroy crops such as lychees, longans and bamboo shoots just before the beginning of the harvest season, farmer Lee Kuo-hsiung (李國雄) said. However, farmers aren’t allowed to catch the monkeys, Lee said. The monkeys are protected under the Wildlife Conservation Act (野生動物保育法). Lin Ying-pin (林英斌), an official at the Kaohsiung City Economic Development Bureau, said the city could not compensate the farmers since the damage caused by the monkeys did not take place within a wildlife conservation area. Lee’s application for national compensation in 2004 was rejected by the Supreme Court in 2007 because the farms were not located in a wildlife conservation area. Lee and other farmers have been seeking the government’s help since 2001.
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