People caught driving without drivers’ licenses may take a driving test if they manage to pay part of the penalty, the Directorate General of Highways (DGH) said yesterday.
DGH Director-General Mile Chen (陳茂南) said that the amendment to the punishment standards for violating road traffic regulations will enable violators to pay the penalty in installments.
“If they can pay the first payment, they can take the test for a drivers’ license,” he said.
Chen said the DGH decided to amend the standards because of a series of incidents in Hsinchu last year.
“We offered courses to residents in Wufong Township (五峰) so they could obtain scooter licenses,” Chen said.
“We found that some of them got tickets for driving without licenses. Because of their financial predicament, they could not afford to pay the tickets. Nor could they take the tests because of these unpaid penalties,” he said.
Chen said there are 350,000 motorists who have neither paid the penalties nor applied to retake the drivers’ licenses.
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
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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