The approach of Typhoon Fanapi dampened participation in the annual International Coastal Cleanup (ICC) yesterday, but six of the country’s counties and cities were still able to mobilize cleanup efforts along their coasts.
Volunteers collected garbage on beaches in Taoyuan, Taichung, Yunlin, Chiayi and Tainan counties and Kaohsiung City as part of efforts to protect the ocean from pollution, the organizer said.
Planned cleanup activities in eastern and northern Taiwan were postponed until next week or canceled because of the storm, it added.
Many countries are mobilizing cleanup efforts this weekend as part of the annual International Coastal Cleanup, the world’s largest volunteer effort for ocean health that traditionally takes place on the third Saturday in September.
Taiwan’s participation was organized by a local marine waste cleaning alliance formed by several nonprofit organizations such as the Kuroshio Ocean Education Foundation (KOEF) and the Taiwan Environmental Information Center. ICC is associated with a beach-waste-monitoring program operated by the US-based Ocean Conservancy. Volunteers are asked to record the category and volume of trash they collect on beaches so researchers can work out solutions that will change the behavior contributing to marine trash, KOEF said.
In September last year, nearly half-a-million volunteers in 108 countries joined the ICC movement. Data they collected showed that 64 percent of the trash on beaches came from coastal leisure activities and daily life activities, 25 percent was related to smoking and 8 percent was created by boats.
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