President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday visited a resident dubbed the “water conservation guru” in a bid to raise people’s awareness about what they can do to make water conservation part of their everyday lives as the nation faces its worst water shortage in more than a decade.
At the home of Yang Hsien-ying (楊賢英) in New Taipei City’s Jhonghe District (中和), the housewife explained to Ma what actions she and her family members have taken to use only 26 cubic meters of water per month on average in a two-month period.
Average water consumption per household is between 30 cubic meters and 40 cubic meters a month, according to government statistics.
Instead of washing dishes under running water, Yang said that she dislodges particles of dirt from dishes with a discarded credit card before soaking them in soapy water in the sink and stores water she uses to rinse the dishes in a container for other purposes, such as mopping or flushing toilets.
By reusing wastewater, washing enough fruit and vegetables for five days at once, replacing toilet cisterns with dual-flush water-saving models, taking showers rather than baths and using homemade soap rather than body gels, her family has reduced water use by 56 percent, Yang said.
Ma asked accompanying Minister of Economic Affairs John Deng (鄧振中) to advertise more effective water conservation measures with a view to reducing water use per person per day from 173 liters to 150 liters to stretch out water supplies.
If water conservation measures are ineffective and catchment areas for reservoirs do not see enough rain, there is a possibility that water shortages might trigger civic unrest, Ma 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:
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