Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) yesterday promised to ensure quality construction at the new American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) office compound in Taipei’s Neihu District (內湖) after a councilor challenged the city government’s authority to monitor the construction.
The AIT’s new office building is set to occupy more than 65,000m2 of government-owned land on Jinhu Road in Neihu. The AIT has signed a contract with the Taiwanese government to lease the land for 99 years for NT$339 million (US$11.6 million) and construction is scheduled to be completed next year.
New Party Taipei City Councilor Vivian Huang (黃珊珊) yesterday said the ongoing construction of the building had disturbed local residents, with constant noise and air pollution. The fence that occupies part of the sidewalk next to the site also poses a threat to the safety of pedestrians, Huang said.
“The AIT building has become a US concession zone that the Taipei City Government has no authority over. Other construction projects in Taipei with such a poor record would have been suspended,” she said during a question-and-answer session at the Taipei City Council.
The contractor of the AIT building is a US-based company and it would be impossible for the city government to fine it or impose other punishments, she added.
Hau dismissed Huang’s concerns, saying that construction companies and contractors on any site in the city should abide by the regulations with no exceptions.
“We’ve already communicated with the AIT and asked the contractor to follow city regulations on transportation, environmental protection and noise,” Hau said.
Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Wu Sheng-chong (吳聖忠) said the department had issued six tickets to the builder over noise and other violations.
The construction of the AIT office building will likely remain unfinished by the target completion date. Obstacles delaying construction are believed to stem from a request by President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration for information on the office’s structure and location, including plans for quarters housing US Marines.
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