While candidates running on the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ticket in the year-end elections have no strict guidelines on reducing the environmental impact of their elections, DPP Spokesman Tsai Chi-chang (蔡其昌) said yesterday that the party has long stressed the importance of reducing and recycling waste.
“Environmental consciousness has long been part of our party culture from the beginning,” Tsai said, adding that the DPP has long advised its candidates to only print and use materials that they need.
Noting that trash and litter often fill streets following election rallies, he said the party had organized teams of volunteers in the past to pick up, recycle and re-use materials wherever possible.
Furthermore, while there are no set regulations using recycled paper for election material, Tsai said candidates almost always do so.
“We have tried diligently to work with candidates to cut waste and litter by giving members of the public pens, pencils, notebooks and other items they can keep and use, rather than the traditional party flags,” Tsai said. “This year, with the A(H1N1) outbreak, we have given out gauze masks with our candidates names on them.”
When reached for comment, representatives of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) said such policies were left to KMT candidates and individual election committees rather than party headquarters.
“These policies are decided by the individual candidates … [we] haven’t given any [instructions] to them” said Chen Shu-rong (陳淑容), a spokeswoman for the party.
She said party nominees usually decide unilaterally on their campaign literature, how it was printed and whether to use recycled paper.
Officials at KMT nominee John Wu’s (吳志揚) headquarters in Taoyuan said flags and other campaign material are often thrown away or recycled if not kept by supporters.
“The flags are often dirty after being left on the ground, how can that be reused?” said an official surnamed Cheng (鄭), who had authority to speak on behalf of Wu’s campaign. “We recycle what we can, but then we don’t get much litter, as it is all carried off by our supporters.”
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