Some of the planned major national constructions that make up the Cabinet's NT$500 billion public infrastructure project lack proper consideration of the nation's sustainable development, activists said yesterday.
Dozens of environmentalists protested in the rain in front of the Executive Yuan yesterday, saying that the recent economic revival had reduced the necessity of the planned construction projects.
Waving banners bearing slogans such as "We don't want artificial lakes" and "Scrap the proposal for the Suao-Hualien freeway," activists urged high-ranking officials to accept their petition letter.
According to Chang Tzu-chien (張子見), an activist with the Wild Bird Society Yunlin, all of the projects were approved under a special law that broadened Cabinet's authority to plan national projects.
Chang said that because of the special law, the projects were approved without offering chances for the public to participate in the decision-making process.
Taking the Suao-Hualien freeway as an example, activists said that the NT$96.2 billion project should be reviewed by giving more weight to regional development considerations in eastern Taiwan.
The activists also criticized planned artificial lakes, saying that the Kao-Ping Great Lake, which would cover 700 hectares of land, was just an excuse to excavate 65 million meters3 of gravel and sandstone.
"Excavating such gravel might profit developers by at least NT$10 billion," said Li Ken-cheng (
Li said that the way the environmental impact assessment was passed was questionable, and he urged the government to review all four proposals for artificial lakes.
The demonstration, however, received no response from the Cabinet. Later, the protesters went to the Legislative Yuan, where Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus director-general Tsai Huang-liang (蔡煌瑯) received their petition letter and promised to communicate with his party.
Meanwhile, Water Resources Agency director-general Chen Shen-hsien (陳伸賢) told the Taipei Times that building artificial lakes was necessary, especially as requisitioning land in mountainous areas for building new reservoirs had become more challenging.
"Artificial lakes are not as bad as some people think. The environmental impact of a project to build an artificial lake is less than for new reservoirs in mountainous areas," Chen said.
Chen said plans to build the Kao-Ping Great Lake and the 300-hectare Taoyuan Great Lake would not be revised.
The precise locations and areas of artificial lakes planned for Tainan and Yunlin counties might be slightly adjusted based on more professional evaluation and communication with the public, Chen said.
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