The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) has demanded an immediate explanation from Robin Winkler, a member serving on the EPA's Environmental Impact Assessment Committee, who it said made slanderous remarks against the administration.
The administration asked Winkler to elaborate on his comments quoted in Tuesday's edition of the Chinese-language United Evening News, in which he said the administration had done their best to cooperate with the Executive Yuan and viewed corporations as its partners.
He was quoted as saying that the administration viewed committee members as enemies.
The administration said that Winkler's comment was untrue and damaged its reputation. It vowed to seek legal action if Winkler did not clarify his statement.
In response, Winkler said yesterday he welcomed the chance to meet EPA Minister Chang Kow-lung (
He said he believed, however, that the conflict had been caused by the media, who were exploiting the situation.
He said the EPA's legal committee had repeatedly adopted interpretations disadvantageous to the environment.
"Just as the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Ministry of Transportation and Communications are not neutral in what they stand for, the EPA should not be neutral in executing the Basic Environmental Law (
He said the EPA often wanted cases pushed through quickly so that its performance would be evaluated favorably by the Executive Yuan.
Tsai Lin-yi (蔡玲儀), a section chief at the EPA's planning division, said the EPA must follow government regulations.
"He wants to be a hero and I am fine with it," she said. "But he really should not attack the administration."
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
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Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
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