Six members serving on the environmental impact review committee of the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) asked the Executive Yuan yesterday to "get its hands off" the supposedly independent group.
"Since last year, the Executive Yuan has treated committee members as if they were stumbling blocks to investment," the six members -- who are also representatives from different non-governmental organizations -- said in a statement.
"To facilitate the passage of environmental assessment reviews, the Executive Yuan has asked the members to streamline their review procedures and restricted the scope of their reviews," they said.
"The measure obviously treats members of the review committee as nothing more than rubber-stampers," the statement said. "We believe it has done more damage to the entire environmental impact review system than to the image of the committee members."
Five of the committee members held a press conference yesterday to express their dissatisfaction with the intrusiveness of the nation's highest administrative authority.
Committee member Gloria Hsu (徐光蓉), who also serves as chairwoman of the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union, said the Executive Yuan had to address several questions.
Officials have to explain why energy consumption has increased when many industries have chosen to move their operations abroad, she said. Another question it needs to answer is who should pay for the damage caused by pollution, such as the recent dioxin incident in Tainan.
Robin Winkler, founder of the Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association and a committee member, said Taiwan had approved the establishment of many factories in its effort to reduce the unemployment rate, but the job opportunities created are available to foreign workers rather than Taiwanese.
He claimed that a million "dignified" jobs would be created if the government shored up the economy with a view to making it a sustainable one.
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