Focus Taiwan
Date: 2015/08/04
By: Chen Pei-yu and Lance Yau

Taipei, August 4 (CNA) With Father’s Day in Taiwan approaching, it may be a good idea for working fathers to look to de-stress. 1111 Job Bank, one of Taiwan’s leading human resource agencies, said Tuesday that according to a recent survey, up to 88% of working fathers are enormously stressed by job-related worries.

Vice President Daniel Lee (李大華) of 1111 Job Bank said that a particular demographic that stands out is young fathers born in the 1990s. Commonly paid well below the average market salary, these new fathers tend to endure the greatest amount of financial pressure.

According to further survey data, the most prevalent sources of stress mainly stem from “financial burdens at home” (76.3 percent), “parenting problems” (39.8 percent) and a “lack of pay raises” (38.3 percent).     [FULL  STORY]

Want China Times
Date: 2015-08-04
By: Xinhua and Staff Reporter

Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je has promised to do “whatever” benefits cross-strait

communication, expressing his hope that he would be in Shanghai for a forum between the two cities.

In an interview on Monday, Ko told Xinhua that he won’t refuse anything that benefits the peaceful development of cross-strait relations and will actively pursue whatever benefits cross-strait communication.

Ko noted that he understood and respected the 1992 Consensus raised by the mainland side as the foundation for the peaceful development of cross-strait relations.

The 1992 Consensus is an agreement which acknowledges that the Chinese mainland and Taiwan belong to one China. While Beijing emphasizes that this means they belong to the same China, the Taiwan side stresses the right to “different interpretations,” making the “consensus” a largely hollow construct for the sake of political convenience.     [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2015/08/03
By: Liao Jen-kai and Lilian Wu

Taipei, Aug. 3 (CNA) The Bureau of Investigation reported Monday that it has cracked

down on an underground remittance group, intercepting four suspects at airports who were about to smuggle more than NT$30 million (US$946,969) out of the country.

The investigators said the suspects were intercepted at the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport and Taichung Airport, with NT$33.7 million in cash seized from them.

The investigators also raided seven locations, including an underground accounting firm and several shops catering to Indonesian workers in Taiwan.

Chang, the mastermind of the underground remittance group, is an Indonesian Chinese, according to the investigators. After obtaining Republic of China nationality in 2013, Chang began to open Indonesian shops of his own and persuaded a dozen others in central and northern Taiwan to serve as his affiliates and collect cash from Indonesian workers in Taiwan seeking to remit money home.     [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2015/08/03
By: Milly Lin and Lilian Wu

Taipei, Aug. 3 (CNA) The official website of the Ministry of Economic Affairs was one of

several official websites that was hacked into and temporarily knocked out of service early Monday morning.

Hacker group Anonymous Asia launched its third wave of attacks in four days in what it claimed was a move to show solidarity with Taiwanese students protesting changes made to the guidelines for Taiwan’s high school history curriculum.

Some of the protesting students have occupied the front courtyard of the Ministry of Education complex since Friday.

The organization launched a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack — referring to crashing a website by overwhelming it with traffic — on the official websites of the ruling Kuomintang (KMT), the New Party, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the KMT’s Taipei chapter, paralyzing the web sites for more than one hour.     [FULL  STORY]

The Star
Date: August 3, 2015

Singapore: Every day for the past month, businessman Joseph Loy would cry in a corner

at Block Four of Singapore General Hospital while his daughter Megan Loy fought for her life in a ward upstairs.

The 18-year-old suffered severe burns on 80% of her body after a huge fire broke out at a water park in Taipei on June 27.

Around 1,000 revellers had gathered for the annual Colour Play Asia festival, in which coloured powder was thrown on partygoers.

There was a huge blast when the powder caught fire. Ten people have died and 339 more are still being treated in Taiwan.

Five of Megan’s friends, who suffered 30% to 50% burns, are still hospitalised in Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Doctors had earlier said Megan had a one-in-five chance of survival. But last Tuesday, they revealed her skin grafts had been successful so far and her burn wounds had been reduced to only five percent of her body.     [FULL  STORY]

Asia One
Date: Aug 3, 2015

TAIPEI, Taiwan – The new Performing Animal Industry Management Act has been

published and is set to come into force this month or in September.

The tragedy of A-he, a hippopotamus that died from injuries this January after leaping from a moving truck on its way to a private zoo, caused much focus and the rights of performing animals and activists began pressing for their rights to be extended.

According to Chiang Wen-chuan head of the Animal Protection Division of the Council of Agriculture’s (COA) Department of Animal Industry, the act completed the necessary procedures in July and will come into force in August or September.

The new regulation caused backlashes in the industry, with many criticizing the rise in the security deposit from NT$300,000 (S$12,999) to NT$5 million, which would be put in use for abandoned animals in case a company suspends operations. The COA said that the human resources agencies need to pay a security deposit for foreign employee referrals in the fishing industry and the fee will also apply to businesses in the performing animal industry.     [FULL  STORY]

The Washington Post
Date:  August 3, 2015
By: Angela Fritz

After blasting the Pacific island of Saipan with wind gusts close to 100 mph, Super

Typhoon Soudelor is taking aim at Taiwan and China, now the equivalent of a category 5 hurricane with wind speeds of 178 mph, and the strongest tropical cyclone yet in 2015.

The powerful cyclone was tiny in size as it crossed Saipan, population 48,000 in the Northern Mariana Islands. The eye of Soudelor was just four miles wide as it made landfall as a category 2 with sustained winds of 105 mph. Weather Underground’s Bob Hensen says that Soudelor was “among the smallest eyes and eyewalls observed anywhere as a tropical cyclone was making landfall.” But given its small size, satellite imagery may not have been sufficient to convey just how strong the typhoon was as it passed over Saipan.

With 350 people in shelters, Saipan has declared a “state of disaster and significant emergency,” reports the Pacific Daily News. “In just about three hours, Typhoon Soudelor—named after a legendary Pohnpeian chief—left behind a devastated wasteland of wrecked homes, fallen electric posts, uprooted trees, vegetation shorn of their leaves, and impassable roadways,” reports the Saipan Tribune. “There were no reports, however, of fatalities.”     [FULL  STORY]

Yahoo News
By:  By Michael Gold, Reuters

TAIPEI (Reuters) – Protests in Taiwan over textbook revisions which students say aim to

brainwash them into accepting a “one China” view of history underscore the island’s growing sense of independence from its vast neighbor and geopolitical foe.

Hundreds of youths stormed the ministry of education compound on Friday and dozens were still camped out in the courtyard as students met the education minister on Monday in a bid to repeal changes to history books likely to hit school shelves this week.

Hundreds of youths stormed the ministry of education compound on Friday and dozens were still camped out in the courtyard as students met the education minister on Monday in a bid to repeal changes to history books likely to hit school shelves this week.

The protesters said they could accept delaying the new curriculum, but the ministry did not back down, prompting some students to break down in tears and storm out of the meeting in anger.     [FULL  STORY]