As motorcycles with 550cc engines or larger are set to hit expressways starting on Thursday, a Taipei City councilor called on the city's police to train staff to respond to any traffic violations by motorcyclists.
New Party Taipei City Councilor Hou Kuan-chiung (
"All nine expressways in the city will be open to those bikers and that regulation will definitely put a greater burden on traffic police. Are the police ready to handle those large-engine motorcycles?" Hou asked yesterday during a question-and-answer session at Taipei City Council.
In response, Taipei City Police Department Commissioner Wang Chou-chiun (
"A total of 155 large-engine motorcycles in the department are more than 10 years old and will be eliminated next year. We'll have to enforce the laws with limited resources," Wang said.
According to department tallies, the city's police force has 163 large-engine motorcycles and 493 policemen licensed to drive them.
Wang said the city council had scrapped the department's budget to purchase new large-engine motorcycles, thereby forcing motorcycle police to ride scooters with 50cc engines.
With so few large-engine motorcycles, Wang said the department would ask police to carry digital cameras to record license plates of traffic violators if bikers do not pull over when asked.
Under the new regulations, motorcycles with 550cc engines or larger will be allowed to operate on the nation's expressways, although local authorities can ban motorcycles on certain stretches if there are valid traffic safety concerns.
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