The Kaohsiung City Government will actively seek to have the International Council of Local Environmental Initiative (ICLEI) establish its Asian Office in the city, Deputy Kaohsiung Mayor Lin Jen-yi (林仁益) said yesterday.
Lin said representatives of the city’s Environmental Protection Bureau had left for the ICLEI’s Resilient Cities 2010, the first international forum on urban resilience and adaptation to climate change, which will be held in Bonn, Germany, from tomorrow through Sunday.
In addition to sharing the city’s experience in energy conservation and reduction of carbon emissions, the city is willing to assume more responsibilities by accommodating the organization’s Asian office, Lin said.
Founded in 1990, the council is an international organization of local governments that promotes cooperation between local governments from various countries on environmental protection and sustainability issues.
It has 1,071 members globally. Kaohsiung joined in 2006, followed by Taipei City, Taipei County, Yunlin County, Pingtung County and Ilan County.
Bureau director-general Lee Mu-sheng (李穆生) said Kaohsiung was the first local government in Taiwan to join the council and is the only Taiwanese city to take part in the forum this year.
In related news, Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) called on the central government to support the city’s plan to build a waterfront light rail system.
During a question-and-answer session with independent Kaohsiung City Councilor Chang Hsin-wu (張省吾), Chen said the city was expected to complete its professional assessment of the planned rail system by the end of next month and to send the report to the Executive Yuan for review in October.
Chen said she believed Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義), a former Kaohsiung mayor, would support the plan because the light rail system would help boost local tourism.
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