Premier Su Tseng-chang (
Su said he wanted to make it easier for the Tainan City Government by reducing the percentage of the budget for the project that the local government is responsible for.
"It is my understanding that this project has been pending for 14 years because the Tainan City Government has been suffering from financial problems. I am here to solve their problems," Su said.
The premier made the remarks during a visit to Tainan yesterday.
He said that the Tainan City Government had been asking for a reduction of the percentage of the budget that the local government should fund itself, but the Ministry of Transportation and Communications was concerned about funding part of the project.
"If the ministry allows such a demand, then other cities and counties will file the same request, and the government is not rich enough to take care of everybody's problems at the same time," Su said.
The Tainan City Government said that the idea to relocate the railways was first proposed 14 years ago and submitted for the first time to the Cabinet for review in 2004.
However, the project had never been carried out because of financial problems.
The entire project would cost approximately NT$29.5 billion (US$894 million).
Originally, the Tainan City Government would have had to cover funding for 24 percent of the budget, approximately NT$7.1 billion.
Su yesterday promised that the Tainan City Government would only have to take care of 12.5 percent of the project's price tag, amounting to approximately NT$3.7 billion.
The construction is expected to be completed in 2015.
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