POLITICS
Ko approval rating at 69.3%
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je’s (柯文哲) approval rating was at 69.3 percent last month, down 6.3 percentage points from August, Taipei’s Research, Development and Evaluation Commission said on Friday. The commission’s survey, conducted about a year after Ko took office on Dec. 25, 2014, showed that 19.8 percent of respondents said they were dissatisfied with the mayor’s performance. The approval rating remains above Ko’s own expectation of a 65 percent satisfaction rate, commission acting head Huang Ming-tsai (黃銘材) said. On specific policies, 78.9 percent of respondents said they were satisfied with Taipei’s safety and security, and 58.8 percent were satisfied with traffic and transportation conditions, but only 36 percent were satisfied with elementary to high-school education in the city, the poll found. The poll had 1,007 respondents and a margin of error of plus or minus-3.09 percentage points.
ENVIRONMENT
Tainan, Kaohsiung air poor
Most parts of Tainan and Kaohsiung have poor air quality, the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said yesterday. As there is little wind, the Chiayi area, as well as the two southern municipalities, are being blanketed with unhealthy levels of PM2.5, the index for fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers, the EPA said. The PM2.5 index for the Fuhsing area of Kaohsiung hit a hazardous level of 10 on the 10-tier scale, indicating PM2.5 concentrations of more than 70 micrograms per cubic meter, it added.
DIPLOMACY
Ad touts Taiwan’s role
The government on Friday placed an advertisement in a US newspaper to highlight the role played by Taiwan in the Asia-Pacific region and the peaceful purpose of Itu Aba Island (Taiping Island, 太平島), the largest of the disputed Spratly Islands (Nansha Islands, 南沙群島) in the South China Sea. The full-page ad in the Washington Times says the Republic of China (ROC) is the only democracy in the ethnic Chinese world and plays the role of a peacemaker in the region, adding the ROC is also important to the US economy and to the global supply chain. The ad contains a photograph of Itu Aba, which Taiwan controls, and of a newly constructed lighthouse on the island, along with the peace initiative proposed by Taiwan for resolving South China Sea territorial disputes. Representative to the US Shen Lyu-shun (沈呂巡) said the purpose of the ad was to tell people that Taiping Island is a naturally formed island that has a 12-nautical-mile (22km) zone of territorial waters and an exclusive economic zone of 200 nautical miles.
EDUCATION
Cram-school survey released
The results of a survey released by the Ministry of Education showed that more than 50 percent of senior high-school students in Taiwan attend cram schools, in most cases to keep up with their regular schoolwork. According to the survey, 52.5 percent of respondents take extra courses at cram schools, as do 18.3 percent of vocational high-school students. Most of them attend the schools to brush up on their coursework and prepare themselves for college entrance exams, which determine which universities and which departments high-school seniors get into. Senior high-school students spend an average of NT$40,595 on cram schools a year, while vocational high-school students spend NT$23,813 a year, the survey found. The survey collected a total of 2,839 valid questionnaires from 87 schools.
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