ENVIRONMENT
Spoonbills begin arriving
The annual black-faced spoonbill season is to commence on Nov. 8, with the Tainan Ecological Conservation Association hosting a series of activities for bird watchers at the Zengwun Estuary Wetlands and the Black-faced Spoonbill Ecology Exhibition Hall in Tainan. As of Saturday, more than 200 of the birds — listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list of threatened species — had arrived in Tainan from their breeding areas in northeast Asia for the winter, with 104 of them spotted in the Zengwun Estuary Wetlands, association president Chiu Jen-wu (邱仁武) said. With the weather getting cooler, the number of black-faced spoonbills arriving in Tainan is expected to exceed 1,000 by the time the bird- watching season starts, Chiu said. Tainan is one of the most important global wintering sites for the bird, accounting for more than 65 percent of its global population.
TRANSPORTATION
New ticketing date set
The Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp (THSRC) said tickets for trips to and from its three newly built stations are to go on sale on Nov. 4. The stations, in Miaolio, Changhua and Yunlin counties, are scheduled to open on Dec. 1. Customers can pre-order “early bird” discounted tickets at THSRC stations or online starting from Nov. 4. Tickets between Taipei and Miaoli, Changhua and Yunlin are to cost NT$430, NT$820 and NT$930 respectively, the company said. A new train schedule is to be announced late this month, with stops at the new stations every hour. Travel time between Taipei and the Zuoying (左營) station in Kaohsiung, which is currently 120 minutes, is to increase to 138 minutes on Dec. 1 when operations at the new stations commence.
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