A luxury cruise liner with 590 tourists from the US on board has decided to sail to Greater Kaohsiung after canceling two scheduled stops in Japan — Kobe and Kyoto — because of concerns about radiation, the Greater Kaohsiung Government said yesterday.
The Oceania Cruises liner Nautica will dock in Kaohsiung Harbor today and give passengers a half-day tour of the southern port city before setting sail for Hong Kong tomorrow at 2am, Marine Bureau officials said.
The last time the cruise liner visited the southern harbor was last month, when it had more than 600 European and US tourists on board.
The ship began its latest Asian cruise on March 11 in Beijing and had been scheduled to stop in Seoul, Shanghai, Hiroshima, Kobe, Kyoto, Okinawa and northern Taiwan before arriving in Hong Kong on March 26.
However, it changed its itinerary because of fear of high radiation levels in Japan after the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant was damaged by a massive earthquake and tsunami on March 11 and subsequently began leaking radiation.
Oceania Cruises was not the only cruise line temporarily crossing Japan off its scheduled destinations.
Melvyn Yap, Silversea Cruises regional director for Asia, said in Hong Kong that the company had decided to cancel four scheduled trips to Japan for four ships next month because of the ongoing radiation scare.
Those ships will instead stop in Hong Kong or harbors in China, he said.
At a separate setting yesterdsay, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞) said about 100 homestay accommodations in Greater Tainan and Changhua County would be offered for Japanese who lost their homes in the earthquake and tsunami.
The victims, including family members and relatives of Japanese students who are currently studing in Taiwan, as well as Taiwanese expatriates currently living in Japan, will be eligible to apply for a month of free accommodation, Lee said.
Staying with a local family could help the temporary Japanese transplants understand and embrace Taiwanese culture, Lee said.
He said that the Civil Aeronautics Administration should offer the lowest possible airfares to aid Japanese survivors who wish to travel to Taiwan.
Changhua County has donated NT$700,000 and 421 boxes of warm clothes to Japan since the disaster struck, county officials said.
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:
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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