Following in the steps of the Tainan mayor and Tainan county commissioner last week, Kao-hsiung County Commissioner Yang Chiu-hsing (楊秋興) and Kaohsiung City Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) yesterday visited Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄), calling for a merger of the two administrative districts.
“The integration of Kaohsiung County and Kaohsiung City should be granted in tandem with the merger of Taichung County and Taichung City,” Yang told reporters before meeting with Liu.
The legislature last week approved an amendment to the Local Government Act (地方制度法), paving the way for the merger between Taichung County and Tai-chung City by the end of next year at the earliest, which was one of President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) campaign promises.
“The vast majority of people and the two local governments [favor] integrating Kaohsiung County and Kaohsiung City,” Yang said. “Despite some concerns from the Kaohsiung City Council, most people hope the merger can take place by the end of next year.”
“If Taichung City and Taichung County are merged before Kaohsiung City and Kaohsiung County, it would only complicate things as southern Taiwan would be marginalized, hampering development,” he added.
Yunlin County Commissioner Su Chih-fen (蘇治芬) and Chiayi County Commissioner Chen Ming-wen (陳明文) have also recently expressed interest in merging their two counties into one special municipality.
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