Taipei will join 100 cities around the globe in planting 1 million trees on April 23 as part of Earth Day events and activities, local organizers said yesterday.
About 10,000 volunteers, mainly students from Taiwanese universities, will gather to plant 20,000 trees in Fudekeng in the city’s Wenshan District (文山), Taiwan Himalayan Nature Civilization Conservation Society president Yang Wen-teh (楊文德) said.
“These undergraduates are our country’s future leaders and they will be standing up to safeguard their future,” Yang said.
The event, dubbed Million Trees Project — International Plantation Day 2011, will take place after Earth Day, which is celebrated around the world on April 22.
The reforestation project will be carried out in 100 cities across Asia, Europe and the Americas. Besides Taipei, other Asian participants include Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Macau, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Manila and Ho Chi Minh City.
According to Yang, the project has won the endorsement of the UN Environment Programme and is a major event of the Earth Day Network.
Hung Li-hui (洪麗惠), CEO of Rainbow Heaven, one of the organizers of the Taipei tree--planting activity, said the recent string of natural disasters in various places around the world serves as a reminder that environmental exploitation can bring horrible consequences.
She expressed the hope that the reforestation effort will help convert “a place that used to be the worst in Taipei into the best.”
Fudekeng was a landfill site until 1994, when it was closed.
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