The Xinyi shopping district will be closed off to cars and scooters from 7am to 5pm on Monday, Sept. 22 to celebrate this year’s Taipei International Car Free Day.
It will be the first time the Taipei City Government has banned automobiles in the district on a working day.
The district between Songgao Road, Xinyi Road, Shifu Road and Songren Road will become a car-free zone during the day. People who take the bus or MRT to the district will enjoy a free ride if they use their EasyCard, Hung Tsang-lang (洪滄浪), a division chief of Taipei City’s Transportation Department, said yesterday at a press conference at MRT Zhongxiao Fuxing Station.
The department further invited the public to join a group biking activity to be held by the city government on Sunday, Sept. 21.
The event, which will start at 6:30am in front of Taipei City Hall, will travel on a 16km route to the Gongguan Riverside Plaza.
The department invited the public to sign up for the event on-site and the first 1,000 participants will receive a free T-shirt.
Commissioner of the department Luo Shiaw-shyan (羅孝賢) said the city government has been advocating “green” transportation with low carbon emissions and encouraged residents to take public transportation more often, not only on the annual Car-Free Day.
“We are focusing our efforts this year on building a ‘Clean Taipei’ with ‘green transportation.’ Hopefully the events will raise people’s awareness of the impending environmental crisis,” he said.
A survey released by the city government last month showed that the number of city residents who ride bikes increased to 10.5 percent of the population up from 6 percent in May.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods