Environmental activists and residents in Neihu District (內湖) yesterday protested against a plan by a well-known religious organization to establish a building in a nature preserve there and called on the Taipei City Government not to approve the project.
Chanting slogans “Don’t damage the environment, Tzu Chi Foundation!” in front of Taipei City Hall, several dozens of activists, led by Green Party Taiwan member and writer Chang Hsiao-feng (張曉風), accused the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation of planning to build a volunteer-training complex in a preservation zone located north of Dahu Park.
The zone, they said, is geologically fragile and not suitable for development.
However, the foundation avoided the necessity of having an environmental impact assessment carried out on the project by limiting the development area to within 5 hectares.
“Our request is simple: We want the group to cancel its plan and we want the city government to turn down the proposal. It doesn’t matter what the group does with the building; establishing buildings there would damage the environment,” Green Party Taiwan member Lee Ying-shuan (李盈萱) said.
Protesters insisted on sitting in on the city’s urban planning committee, which convened yesterday to review the proposal. They threatened to hold another protest if the city approved the plan.
Lin Min-chao (林敏朝), a division chief at the foundation, defended the proposal, saying construction would not damage the environment.
“Neihu has become a highly developed area and what we want to do is to push for a plan that strikes a balance between social welfare and environmental protection,” he said.
Tzu Chi purchased the plot of land in 1997 and applied with the city to construct a building in 2005. For the building to be erected legally, the city government would have to change the land designation from preservation zone to “social welfare special zone.”
Lin said the building would be used to train volunteers, while other parts of the land would serve as storage space for recycled materials and relief resources.
The committee failed to reach a consensus on whether to approve the project and said it would hold another meeting to discuss the case.
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,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: