Various environmental protection groups blasted the government's plan to build a freeway in eastern Taiwan at a public hearing yesterday, but a Ministry of Transportation and Communications official said that project will start by the end of the year as scheduled.
PFP Legislator Lee Hung-chun (
The environmentalists expressed their hope that the government will reconsider the plan to build a freeway between Ilan and Hualien and demanded to know why the project was finalized in the run-up to the Hualien county commissioner by-election, especially since Hualien already has a harbor, an airport, a recently widened highway and a newly electrified railway.
Both Chen Man-li (陳曼麗), chairman of the Home-maker's Union and Foundation, and Wu Tung-chieh (蘇治芬), executive director of the Green Formosa Front, said that a 10km tunnel that is part of the freeway plan is prone to earthquakes and of worrisome construction quality.
Green Citizen's Action Alliance Secretary-General Lai Wei-chih (
Robin Winkler, an American attorney who has lived in Taiwan for 26 years, also said that the country should stop its continuous development and start to pay attention to ecology and conservation issues.
Chi Hsu-ying (
Lee said that the decision to build the Suhua Freeway was made out of election considerations, while Su said that major construction projects should take into account the natural environment and the landscape, and should respect the voice of the local people.
Despite the opposition, Chen Fu-an (陳福安), a head engineer from the ministry's Taiwan Area National Expressway Engineering Bureau, said that the project has been studied since 1990 and that construction of the freeway will start as scheduled, beginning with tunnel construction.
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