As thousands of visitors streamed through a Hong Kong exhibition hall and deals were struck for works by Picasso and Yayoi Kusama, art collectors celebrated the Asian financial hub’s return to its bustling heyday. The scenes at Hong Kong’s Art Basel fair last week had not been seen since 2019, with a crackdown on pro-democracy protests and pandemic restrictions in the intervening years radically transforming the city. More than 86,000 visitors poured through the halls of the fair, reflecting a return to pre-pandemic numbers, with reported sales of more than US$98 million, double those of 2019, according to organizers. Among the biggest deals were a 1964 Picasso sold for US$5.5 million, as well as works by Japanese artist Kazuo Shiraga (US$5 million) and a strikingly surreal “pumpkin” by Kusama (US$3.5 million), according to reported sales figures released by the fair. The energy at Art Basel reflected the increasing importance of the Asian art market, said organizers, who told AFP that their work was not impacted by the city’s national security law. “Asia has been the fastest developing art market in the world,” said Angelle Siyang-Le, director of Art Basel Hong Kong. For some, however, the success of the fair was not indicative of a healthy art scene. Hong Kong once held a reputation as a bastion of free speech within authoritarian China, but the national security law (NSL) imposed in 2020 after widespread and sometimes violent pro-democracy protests has criminalized dissent, including in art. “I don’t think just because the sale(s) number at Art Basel is good (it) means ‘Hong Kong is Back,’” said Kacey Wong (黃國才), a dissident artist who left the city in 2021 due to the crackdown. “The NSL created self-censorship amongst the creative industry. Instead of exploring social/political topics, artists dive more into decorative colorful subjects to avoid the NSL’s red line(s).” Last week,
Among the many atrocities committed by the Japanese during World War II, the Sook Ching massacre was notable for the involvement of Taiwanese. Having captured Singapore in February 1942, the Japanese army and its accomplices killed at least 25,000 Chinese. Prominent among the invaders’ henchmen was Wee Twee Kim (Huang Duijin, 黃堆金), an interpreter-turned-enforcer who — as this riveting new book reveals — was one of many Taiwanese participants in abuses against overseas Chinese, Allied POWS and local civilians. As an employee of the Japanese Southern Asian Company, Wee had been posted to Singapore in 1917. He started out managing Chinese factory laborers, before switching to a similar role at another Japanese enterprise — the South Seas Warehouse Company. Like many of the Taiwanese featured in this book, Wee’s cultural and linguistic affinities with the Hoklo-speaking Chinese in Southeast Asia were maximized by the Japanese, and — following the invasion — he was enlisted as an interpreter for the occupying military. This job description was euphemistic: Wee’s remit went far beyond innocuous translation duties. He was given free rein in soliciting “donations” from the Chinese community in support of the Japanese war effort. Even Japanese personnel remarked upon his brutality in shaking down his local Chinese for millions of dollars. “Every Chinese disliked the Formosans,” wrote Shinozaki Mamoru, a Japanese journalist-cum-spy-cum-executive officer. (It should be noted — and, regrettably, isn’t — that Shinozaki, whose memoir is an important secondary source for these accounts, was considered self-serving and untrustworthy in his testimony at a war crimes tribunal.) Cowed by threats of violence, prominent representatives of the pro-Japanese Overseas Chinese Association were victims of Wee’s extortion. While several of his fellow Taiwanese “interpreters” later received death sentences, Wee evaded war crimes investigators. Having disappeared, he reportedly met a well-deserved fate at the hands of
The opportunity that brought Ming Turner (陳明惠) back to Taiwan a decade ago had an environmental theme, but since then, she admits, paying attention to environmental issues “hasn’t really been my thing.” Turner, who attended graduate school in the UK, initially returned to curate an event in Kaohsiung’s Cijin District (旗津), not far from where she grew up. Some years after she and her husband decided they’d stay in Taiwan, they moved to Tainan’s Annan District (安南) with their two young children. Turner is now an associate professor in the Institute of Creative Industries Design and director of visual and performance arts at the National Cheng Kung University Art Center in Tainan. In November last year, when she first learned that a private company is planning to build a power plant in neighboring Anding District (安定), Turner was outraged. As she wrote in the Jan. 8 issue of this newspaper, “there are already two power stations affecting air quality in Tainan in particular and southern Taiwan in general.” In her op-ed, Turner said that the proposed Jiuwei Nanke Gas-fired Power Plant (九崴南科天然氣電廠) would be uncomfortably close to the National Museum of Taiwan History (國立臺灣歷史博物館), the Asia-Pacific International Baseball Training Centers (亞太國際棒球訓練中心), a major hospital, several schools and a site earmarked for social housing. Turner now serves as a representative of Taishibo Community Self-Help Association (台史博社區居民自救會). On March 14, she was quoted by The Reporter (a nonprofit Chinese-language online media) as saying that, while burning gas is less polluting than burning coal, the Jiuwei Plant will emit an estimated 309 metric tons of nitrogen oxides each year. What’s more, because the site is below a flightpath, the plant’s chimney will be no taller than 53m, affecting the diffusion of pollutants. SUPPLYING OTHERS What incenses many Anding and Annan residents is that the Jiuwei power station isn’t being
When he appears in Nicole Flattery’s recently published novel Nothing Special, Andy Warhol is a spectral presence. “I never saw him come in but I felt the atmosphere change when he did,” Flattery writes from the watchful point of view of the teenage narrator of the book. The coming-of-age novel set in the mid 1960s, with some flashes into the present, follows Mae, a lonely teenager who drops out of school after finding herself drawn into the new world of Warhol’s storied Factory in Manhattan. While art and drama and debauchery happen around her among the artist and his acolytes, Mae has the more prosaic job of typist. She is transcribing recordings of conversations that will form the basis of A Novel, Warhol’s (real) experimental book from 1968. “I feel things work if you just don’t often see that person,” Flattery says of her version of Warhol. “It’s in their interest to remain out of your eyeline. They’ll only have the power if they make themselves like a distant, inaccessible figure.” Flattery’s reimagining of Warhol might see him as distant, but 36 years after his death, he is ever-present in the public’s imagination. In fact, the recent obsession with him in theater, film and books can make it seem as though you are never more than a meter away from a Warhol-related event. Opening on Friday at London’s Fashion and Textile museum is Andy Warhol: The Textiles, a survey of his lesser-seen textile designs made in his time as a successful commercial artist in the 1950s and early 60s. In April, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris will launch a show of the mid-1980s paintings he made with Jean-Michel Basquiat. Last year The Collaboration, Anthony McCarten’s play, which premiered at the Young Vic and later transferred to New York, explored the relationship between the
Last week, the huge news broke that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) would not host an open primary for its presidential nominee, but instead pick a candidate through a committee process. KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) sent forth a few polite meaningless words about party unity in making the announcement. There’s great commentary on this momentous move, so I will say only that for those of you who think the KMT will “never be that dumb,” I have three words for you: Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), the unelectable candidate the party chose for the 2016 presidential race. Criticism of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) justifiably abounds, but it should be noted that whoever becomes the KMT candidate is going to lead a party whose policymaking is even less imaginative than the DPP’s. Those interested in the popularity of the oft-mentioned potential KMT candidacy of New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) should peruse the New Taipei City Web page, whose English home page URL is: foreigner.ntpc.gov.tw. The translations are as unprofessional as the URL name. Hou’s policies are hardly different from any other city leader in Taiwan, indicating that his popularity is not based on dynamic transformation of the city, as with the DPP’s Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) and Chen Chu (陳菊) in Kaohsiung, or Chen Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) in Taoyuan, but on his personal charisma and his oddball oppositional stances to mainstream KMT positions — a factor, along with his Taiwanese heritage, that also gets him in trouble with party insiders. Indeed, it would be hard to find a KMT mayor who has had a positive transformational effect on the livability of their city and become nationally known for doing so. That is striking for a party that remains a power at the local level, indicative of what voters actually want from their
March 27 to April 2 After placing fifth in the 1964 Miss Universe pageant in Miami, “Miss China” Yu Yi (于儀) toured the US to great fanfare. The Chinese community in San Francisco called her the “pride of the Republic of China (ROC),” and she even received the key to New York City. Taiwan’s Miss China pageant produced three winners that year who performed on the international stage. Lin Su-hsin (林素幸), the second Taiwan-born Miss China, did even better, claiming third place in London’s Miss World. She says she was elated to see the ROC flag flying in the UK, which had severed ties with Taiwan in 1950, and also toured Europe and East Asia afterward to promote the ROC. Despite this success, the pageant was canceled the following year due to various controversies and financial difficulties. It did not resume until 1988 as “Miss Republic of China.” Even until 1986, the government insisted that there was no place for beauty pageants in Taiwan due its austerity policy and the need to focus on war-readiness against the Chinese communists. But ever since the US broke ties with Taiwan in 1979, there had been discussions about resuming the pageant to boost the nation’s visibility and show the world its economic progress. In 1987, Miss Universe officials personally visited Taipei and offered to let the city host the final competition. They noted that despite its economic miracle, Taiwan was still a mysterious country to Westerners. It was a great opportunity as the event’s worldwide broadcast would include a 30-minute video introducing the nation. In October that year, the government lifted the ban on national pageants. Miss China was revived on April 1, 1988, but it wasn’t the only one as four other pageants were launched
A Hong Kong department store took down a digital artwork that contained hidden references to jailed dissidents, in an incident the artist says is evidence of erosion of free speech in the semi-autonomous Chinese city. It was unclear whether the government played a role in the decision to remove the artwork, it came just days after a slasher film featuring Winnie the Pooh, a figure often used in playful taunts of China’s President Xi Jinping (習近平), was pulled from local cinemas. Patrick Amadon’s No Rioters was put on display on a billboard at the SOGO Causeway Bay Store for an exhibition that started last Friday, as the city was promoting its return as a vibrant cultural hub following years of pandemic travel restrictions. Art Basel Hong Kong, a prominent art fair in Asia, began this week, alongside other art events. Hong Kong is a former British colony that returned to China’s rule in 1997, promising to retain its Western-style freedoms. The city was rocked by a massive pro-democracy protest movement in 2019, which ended after China imposed a “National Security Law” that criminalized much dissent. The city’s government has since jailed and silenced many activists. Amadon said he had followed the protests in Hong Kong closely, and he wanted his work to show solidarity with the protesters and remind people about the new reality of the city. “It was too much watching Art Week in Hong Kong pretend the Chinese government didn’t crush a democracy and turn Hong Kong into a vassal surveillance state... because it’s a convenient location for a good market,” the Los Angeles-based artist said. Amadon said he knew the work would be controversial and was surprised it had been displayed in public for days. It featured a panning surveillance camera. Flashes of Matrix-like text showcased the names and prison sentences of convicted activists
Our capacity to care about others may have very, very ancient origins, a new study suggests. It might have been deep-rooted in prehistoric animals that lived millions of years ago, before fish and mammals like us diverged on the tree of life, according to researchers who published their study Thursday in the journal Science. “Some of the mechanisms that underlie our ability to experience fear, or fall in and out of love, are clearly very ancient pathways,” said Hans Hofmann, an evolutionary neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the research. Scientists are usually reluctant to attribute humanlike feelings to animals. But it’s generally accepted that many animals have moods, including fish. The new study shows that fish can detect fear in other fish, and then become afraid too — and that this ability is regulated by oxytocin, the same brain chemical that underlies the capacity for empathy in humans. The researchers demonstrated this by deleting genes linked to producing and absorbing oxytocin in the brains of zebrafish, a small tropical fish often used for research. Those fish were then essentially antisocial — they failed to detect or change their behavior when other fish were anxious. But when some of the altered fish received oxytocin injections, their ability to sense and mirror the feelings of other fish was restored — what scientists call “emotional contagion.” “They respond to other individuals being frightened. In that regard, they behave just like us,” said University of Calgary neuroscientist Ibukun Akinrinade, a co-author of the study. The study also showed that zebrafish will pay more attention to fish that have previously been stressed out — a behavior the researchers likened to consoling them. Previous research has shown that oxytocin plays a similar role in transmitting fear in mice. The new research illustrates “the ancestral role” of oxytocin in
Pingtung County was home to many of Taiwan’s earliest Hakka immigrants. Jiadong Township (佳冬鄉), now little more than a small rural outpost along the road to Kenting with a slowly dwindling population and a local economy supported mainly by aquaculture, was once a thriving Hakka stronghold. Evidence of the residents’ strong family ties, self-reliance and, in some cases, keen business sense, still remains. At the time of the Japanese takeover in 1895, it was still an important enough center that the incoming colonists sent a special military mission to capture it. Nowadays, much has been done to preserve the cultural heritage of the village and turn it into a “Living Museum.” It makes for a lovely, tranquil day trip without the crowds, noise and bustle of large museums or one of Taiwan’s many “old streets.” Prominent families have left their mark at several sites throughout the village, which are now open to the public as historic sites, though some remain in use by the families. TAIWAN’S ONLY YIN-YANG POOL Looking at a map of the old downtown core of Jiadong, one can see a road just west of the train station called Jiasing Road (佳興路). Two things about this road are immediately obvious from a bird’s-eye view: it is the division between village residences on one side and farmland on the other, and it has a conspicuous feature in and out about halfway along its course. Originally, this road was to take a straight course, but after concerted efforts from locals, the property standing in the way was designated as a historic site and the road plan was diverted. This is the site of Yang Clan Ancestral Hall (楊氏宗祠). Ancestral halls, where families worship important ancestors and hold other important functions, are a common site in Taiwan. This particular hall was built
Part of this movie is set in Moon Kingdom, a fantastical place hidden in an abandoned amusement park, but the reality 16-year-old Melody (Cheng Hsi-ti, 程希緹) lives in is also quite surreal. Eschewing linearity, Melody-Go-Round shifts between the two realms and also jumps through time, but the plot is still an easily digestible family drama. After a bad investment leads the family into bankruptcy, Melody’s father Tai-sheng (James Wen, 溫昇豪) moves the family into his friend’s empty rural mansion. The friend emigrated to the US after marrying an American woman, and the decor of the house is eccentric, almost like a Western castle. Tai-sheng drives around town in the friend’s old car with American flags planted on each side of the hood, eking out a living through odd jobs such as reporting illegal cars, hunting pigeons and selling counterfeit goods. These ventures often get him in trouble. His marriage to Hui-min (Peggy Tseng, 曾珮瑜), who reluctantly works as a salesperson in a luxury jewelry store, has collapsed, but they’re still determined to fake it until Melody turns 18. But they aren’t good at it, fighting incessantly and carrying on affairs. Melody is aware of the latter, of course, accidentally seeing her mother have car sex, and her frustration and anger toward her parent’s behavior and shenanigans are the focus of the plot. The simple premise is made entertaining through the overt surrealism in both worlds. Melody is invited to join the Moon Kingdom after sneaking into the creepy amusement park, which is inhabited by a group of youngsters who wrestle, hunt, make hooting sounds and claim to be totally free. The real-world bits are more surreal than the fantasy bits. In one scene, Tai-sheng calms a vicious dog by jerking it off while delivering street-caught pigeons to a customer. The bizarre scene ends
Florence Pugh plays a New Jersey 20-something whose life is upended when she gets into a car crash that kills her future sister-in-law and brother-in-law and leaves her addicted to painkillers in Zach Braff’s new film A Good Person. All filmmakers should be so lucky to have Florence Pugh in their movies. She so consistently delivers the best version of whatever she’s handed — whether good, mediocre or downright preposterous — that you may even start to wonder if the quality of the film around her really matters in the end. It does, of course, but her performances make whatever she’s in difficult to dismiss wholly. In Zach Braff’s A Good Person, Pugh is a New Jersey 20-something named Allison whose life is upended in a flash. On her way to try on wedding dresses in the city, she’s involved in an accident that leaves her future sister and brother-in-law dead and her addicted to opioid painkillers. Braff wrote the part specifically for her. The two dated for three years, a relationship that was scrutinized by many onlookers for their 21-year age difference, which she often defended. Last year, they quietly broke up. In the past several years, Braff has suffered significant losses — his sister, his father, one of his best friends. He is an actor and filmmaker who has directed only four features, including his debut Garden State, which — however it may have aged 19 years later — was promising and captured a moment for a specific white hipster set. Now in his mid-40s and a lifetime away from sitcom fame and indie-darling debuts, Braff still has that spark and promise. This time, he wanted to write about grief, which was the birth of A Good Person, an ensemble piece about tragedy, mourning, addiction, forgiveness and people who keep messing up despite
For Kevin Leung, a head instructor at a kung fu school in Monterey Park in Los Angeles county, California, the past eight weeks have been a disorienting readjustment to normalcy. His academy, the Siu Lum Pai Kung Fu Association, had for years held weekly classes at Star Ballroom Dance Studio, where he knew many members of the community. To combat the rise in anti-Asian violence during the pandemic, Leung also led many free self-defense classes there for Asian seniors. But since a shooter opened fire at the ballroom on Lunar New Year in January, killing 11 people, Leung has been questioning the effectiveness of community-led safety initiatives — often those protecting the most vulnerable members of the group — in the absence of more stringent gun control policies. “We trained ourselves and put ourselves out there in the community to be more vigilant,” he said. “But even with all the preparation in the world, someone kinda comes in with a gun, what can you do?” STRICTER GUN LAWS Nearly two months after back-to-back shootings in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, California, left 18 people — most of them senior citizens of Asian descent — dead in less than 48 hours, Asian American organizers, gun owners and gun control advocates are divided over how to address the twin rise of gun violence and gun ownership in their community. Both perpetrators, who were also Asian immigrants, were among the oldest mass shooters in US history. Even before the shootings, more than two-thirds of Asian Americans in the state said they were worried about gun violence, the highest level among all racial groups, according to the 2021 California Health Interview Survey. Only one-third of whites, by contrast, responded similarly. Nearly half of Black and Asian American teens expressed concern about being victims of gun violence. Asian Americans have
Search giant Baidu’s lacklustre unveiling of its chatbot exposed gaps in China’s race to rival ChatGPT, as censorship and a US squeeze on chip imports have hamstrung the country’s artificial intelligence ambitions. The highly anticipated preview of “Ernie Bot” last week was limited to a pre-recorded demonstration with simple questions to summarize the plot of a sci-fi novel and solving a straightforward algebra equation — to avoid politically and factually incorrect answers. From cloud computing to autonomous driving, none of the array of services Baidu had earlier promised its Ernie Bot could do were on display. The firm’s shares plunged as much as 10 percent during the unveiling, although they rallied the following day on positive reviews from brokerages including Citigroup, whose analysts were among a small group of people invited to test the bot. A flurry of Chinese companies including Alibaba, JD.com, Netease and TikTok-parent Bytedance have rushed to develop services that can mimic human speech since San Francisco-based OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November, sparking a gold rush in the market. Google on Tuesday invited people in the US and Britain to test its AI chatbot, known as Bard, as it continues on its own push to catch up. The popularity of ChatGPT in China — where users have to scale Beijing’s Internet firewall using virtual private networks (VPNs) and foreign phone numbers — has left Baidu and others scrambling to regain its dominance on home turf. “OpenAI probably spent as much time just testing GPT-4 as Baidu spent building Ernie Bot,” said Matt Sheehan, fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “China’s tech ecosystem doesn’t have a tradition of funding open-ended research that doesn’t have a clear path to profitability.” CHIP SUPPLY Ernie Bot is fluent in Mandarin, as well as other regional languages including Hakka spoken in South China and Taiwan, and targets the Chinese
IN 2002 Thomas Hertog received an e-mail summoning him to the office of his mentor Stephen Hawking. The young researcher rushed to Hawking’s room at Cambridge. “His eyes were radiant with excitement,” Hertog recalls. Typing on the computer-controlled voice system that allowed the cosmologist to communicate, Hawking announced: “I have changed my mind. My book, A Brief History of Time, is written from the wrong perspective.” Thus one of the biggest-selling scientific books in publishing history, with worldwide sales credited at more than 10 million, was consigned to the waste bin by its own author. Hawking and Hertog then began working on a new way to encapsulate their latest thinking about the universe. Next month, five years after Hawking’s death, that book — On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s final theory — will be published in the UK. Hertog will outline its origins and themes at a Cambridge festival lecture on March 31. “The problem for Hawking was his struggle to understand how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life,” says Hertog, a cosmologist currently based at KU Leuven University in Belgium. Examples of these life-supporting conditions include the delicate balance that exists between particle forces that allow chemistry and complex molecules to exist. In addition, the fact there are only three dimensions of space permits stable solar systems to evolve and provide homes for living creatures. Without these properties, the universe would probably not have produced life as we know it, it is argued by some cosmologists. Hertog and Hawking were set on hammering out explanations for this state of stellar uncertainty after the latter had decided his previous attempts were inadequate. “Stephen told me he now thought he had been wrong and so he and I worked, shoulder to shoulder, for the next 20 years to develop a new
How do stars — or any of us — tick? Artists, of course, have bodies of work for their exegetes to parse, and Lou Reed’s is one of the more influential in western popular music. From his early days in the Velvet Underground documenting the New York demi-monde to a series of dissonant and beautiful solo works thereafter, the public Reed had a reputation as a curmudgeon who did not suffer fools gladly. But he had another body of work: his actual body, damaged by drug use and beleaguered by diabetes and hepatitis C. That body was a work in progress, transformed by the practice of martial arts. “It saved him,” notes Princeton creative writing professor AM Homes, who Lou Reed consulted when he set out to write a book about tai chi in 2009. It’s a sentiment echoed by many others in this version of that book — finished posthumously, scrapbook-style, by artist Laurie Anderson, his partner, in collaboration with Reed’s close associates Stephan Berwick, Bob Currie and Scott Richman. Here, then, is a wealth of oral history-style interviews with a wide array of Reed’s contemporaries conducted by Anderson and the book’s other editors, and transcripts where Reed discusses his tai chi practice with martial arts magazines. The guest list is both star-studded and intimate, from Iggy Pop to Anohni, via producers Tony Visconti and the late Hal Willner, director Darren Aronofsky, the late photographer Mick Rock, magician Penn Jillette (the former president of the Velvet Underground fan club and hoarder of bootlegs) and many of Reed’s closest friends. His transplant surgeon is consulted; classical pianist Hsia-jung Chang is one of the relatively scarce female voices in this martial arts crowd. Reed was so obsessed with tai chi that he used to travel with a collection of fighting swords According to many, Reed was
Avoiding the worst ravages of climate breakdown is still possible, and there are “multiple, feasible and effective options” for doing so, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said. Hoesung Lee, chair of the body, which is made up of the world’s leading climate scientists, made clear that — despite the widespread damage already being caused by extreme weather, and the looming threat of potentially catastrophic changes — the future was still humanity’s to shape. The IPCC reports show that humanity has the knowhow and the technology to tackle human-induced climate change. But not only that. They show that we have the capacity to build a much more prosperous, inclusive and equitable society in this process. “Tackling climate change is a hard, complex and enduring challenge for generations. We, the scientific community, spell out the facts of disheartening reality, but we also point to the prospects of hope through concerted, genuine and global transformational change,” Lee said. FINANCE KEY Finance would be key, he said. The shift to a low-carbon economy would take between three and six times the amounts of funding currently devoted to green investment, according to the final section of the IPCC’s comprehensive sixth assessment report (AR6) of human knowledge of the climate. Climate justice would also be vital, the IPCC said, because the people being hit hardest by the impacts of the crisis were the poorest and most vulnerable who have done least to cause the problem. Aditi Mukherji, one of the 93 authors of the “synthesis report,” the final section that draws together the key findings, said: “Almost half the world’s population lives in regions that are highly vulnerable to climate change. In the last decade, deaths from floods, droughts and storms were 15 times higher in highly vulnerable regions.” This positive framing of a report that makes mostly very grim
A ban on megaconstellations of low-altitude satellites — arrays such as Elon Musk’s Starlink — should be considered, astronomers have said, in an effort to reduce light pollution and preserve our ability to study the skies. In a series of papers and opinion pieces published in the journal Nature Astronomy, scientists have raised the alarm about the brightening night sky, with one team of experts calling for scientists to stand up to “big light” as they have to other fields, such as big tobacco and big oil, and bring in regulation. For megaconstellations of low-altitude satellites, they write, this could mean a veto. “On the scales of immediate or long-term benefits and harm to society, and despite the popularity of satellite megaconstellations, we must not reject the possibility of banning them. On the contrary, we believe that the impacts and risks are too high for this possibility to be ruled out,” they write. The team say that it is unlikely that bodies contributing to light pollution — be it from ground-based LEDs or other lamps, or low-altitude satellites — will regulate themselves. “Every time some health or environmental issue arises and starts to be addressed in the scientific literature, the ‘machine of doubt’ is put into action by the polluters to stop, or at least delay by years or decades, the adoption of countermeasures and rules to protect human health and the environment,” write Fabio Falchi, from the Light Pollution Science and Technology Institute in Italy, and co-authors in a comment piece. As a result, the team have called for action. “In my opinion there should be a cap limit on the total number of satellites in low orbits, and their number is probably already too high,” Falchi said, with the team writing that caps should also be introduced for artificial light at night. According to an accompanying
It’s a fairly common scenario: A property has been foreclosed and sold at auction on behalf of a bank, but it remains occupied. The former owner may be refusing to leave, because he has nowhere else to go. Humans or animals may be squatting inside. Or — and this happens often enough that many foreclosure specialists have come across it — the stay-ons are gods. On June 1, 2020, ETToday reported on one such case in New Taipei City. Following the sale of a foreclosed apartment in Sinjhuang District (新莊), a second auction, to dispose of movable items left inside, was announced. The bidders’ guide listed two air-conditioning units, two TVs, four wardrobes, some other furniture — plus seven god effigies, an ancestor tablet and the altar on which they stood. As is usual in such situations, all 21 pieces were offered as a single, indivisible lot. The inclusion of sacred icons raised eyebrows, as such issues are usually resolved swiftly and without publicity, so as not to impact a property’s value. Many people expressed doubt that a buyer would be found, because the idea of taking possession of discarded religious or ancestor-worship paraphernalia under any circumstances, even a court-approved transaction, is widely regarded with horror. BEWARE OF THE GODS A June 9, 2015 article in the Liberty Times (the Chinese-language sister newspaper of the Taipei Times) touched on this taboo, and contained a warning from Chuang Yen-yu (莊研育), a scholar of local customs and culture. Those with the best of intentions shouldn’t pick up an effigy they find abandoned by the roadside, he said. If the god’s spirit has left the idol, taking it home and worshiping it “may have counterproductive effects.” It would be best, Chuang advised, “to seek out a professional” capable of handling the icon appropriately. Kaohsiung-based numerologist Feng Yan-zhu (馮巖筑) advertises
Last week Vice President William Lai (賴清德) announced that he would be a candidate in the party’s presidential primary. As Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairman, Lai is widely understood to have the inside track on the presidential nomination. Lai’s comments consisted of the usual DPP noise in national elections, focusing on China. “We must be united to strengthen Taiwan, stick to the democratic camp and ensure Taiwan’s security” in the face of increased Chinese “saber rattling” and “unscrupulous diplomatic bullying,” he said. He also made a vague nod to the economy, the environment (green energy) and supply chains. Whenever his name is mentioned, there is an immediate media frenzy about his illusory “hardline” pro-independence position. For example, at present, his Wiki page is largely a compendium of Lai’s adventures in independence politics. In reality, his position is bog-standard mainstream DPP, perhaps a little to the right of it. In 2017 he even floated the concept of “being close to China while loving Taiwan.” The obsessive media focus on Lai’s imagined crazed independence warrior persona has obscured his stance on crucial domestic issues. Who is William Lai? POPULAR POLITICIAN On the surface, he is a success. He served 11 years as a legislator, was re-elected three times, and was named Taiwan’s best legislator by Citizens Congress Watch four times. As a former doctor, he immersed himself in health issues. Notably, he was re-elected legislator in 2008 during the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tsunami. It’s forgotten now, but he was the DPP caucus whip, a position requiring personal and political skills, and he led legislative delegations to both the US and Japan. This is experience our last two presidents have lacked. Though he has no serious foreign policy experience, during his legislative years he was involved in the lobbying effort for WHO membership, and visited 22
RSS