Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
While concern about potential damage to water quality in Feitsui Reservoir (
Before Ma and the city councilors arrived, a group from Ilan protesting outside the EPA criticized Ma for politicizing the issue.
The protesters, led by legislators from Ilan, said that Ma's visit to the EPA was nothing but a political show.
They called on Ma and the city council not to sacrifice the rights of people from Ilan and confuse Taipei residents by making it a political issue.
During the meeting, the issue once again became a political tug-of-war as the city government and EPA failed to reach any conclusion amid heated argument.
Ma and city councilors from the blue camp reiterated their concerns and questioned the EPA over an allegedly unlawful procedure used in granting the Ministry of Transportation and Communications permission to open the section of highway.
"The EPA turned down the ministry's proposal to open an intersection in Pinglin as early as 1991. Allowing the ministry to open the section now is contradicting your own decision and is ignoring the environmental experts' advice," Ma said during the meeting with the EPA yesterday afternoon.
EPA Minister Chang Kuo-lung (
The ministry then filed another request with the EPA, and in the meantime opened the interchange to residents in Pinglin (
"We asked the ministry to provide all the documents in order to request the modifications, and right now we are still waiting for them to give us complete information," Chang said.
When asked why the EPA allowed the ministry to open the section when it hadn't provided enough documents to pass the EPA review, Chang stressed that the ministry made the decision according to the MOI's regulations, but that the EPA could only give environmental advice, and it "did not have the right to make the decision."
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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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