Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) announced yesterday that no further expansion of the Shida Night Market, one of the city’s busiest tourist attractions, would be permitted, in a bid a protect the rights of residents.
In addition to the expansion ban, Hau also instructed officials to ensure businesses in the area stick to strict management regulations and carefully screen new business applications.
Hau’s decision came after strong opposition from local residents, who accused businesses in the area of adversely impacting their quality of life and staged a demonstration on Oct. 26.
Hau said problems relating to noise, unpleasant odors from restaurants and issues with public safety violate the rights of residents and he instructed officials to conduct regular inspections and random checks.
Taipei City Government spokesman Chang Chi-chiang (張其強) said the local police precinct would also be told to make a greater effort to enforce the ban on illegal street vendors.
The city government had received complaints about 506 of the 647 businesses registered to work in the night market, Chang added.
Tax revenues from the night market near National Taiwan Normal University totaled NT$12.3 billion (US$408.6 million) in 2009, rising to NT$14.7 billion last year, figures from the Taipei National Tax Administration showed.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS