People calling for the preservation of the Losheng Sanatorium yesterday launched a surprise protest outside the debate venue for vice presidential candidates as President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) arrived to show support for his running mate, Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義), with one protester getting to within 1m of the president.
“President Ma, please save Losheng! President Ma, please save Losheng!” a woman shouted as she jumped out from the press area in front of the Public Television Service building in Taipei City, where the debate was held, just as Ma stepped out of his car.
Though surrounded by secret service agents and police officers, the protester managed to get an arm’s length away from the president.
She was quickly pulled away by security personnel, but another group of Losheng conservationists across the street took out banners and placards that read “President Ma, please save Losheng,” and “Losheng SOS” before trying to storm across the street.
Police officers rushed across the street to block their progress and arrested several protesters.
“The [Taipei City] Department of Rapid Transit Systems promised that the Losheng site would be safe. However, because of the complicated geological composition in the area and the underground water reservoir, the ground and the buildings are now cracking,” a spokesman for the Youth Alliance for Losheng surnamed Liao (廖) said when explaining the protest. “We petitioned Ma in 2008 about the issue when he just took office, but he did nothing about it. We’re here to remind him again, and we shouted our demands in front of him so that he cannot continue to pretend that he didn’t hear us.”
During the clashes, a reporter surnamed Wang (王) of Coolloud.org, an Internet-based news source, was also arrested and sent to a nearby police station with five other protesters, with police saying they suspected that he had brought them along.
Wang denied the accusation, and was released after a brief interrogation.
“How could I carry protesters in with me? I think the police were trying to find someone to blame for the loopholes in their security measures, and I, a reporter affiliated with a small Internet media company, am just the perfect target,” Wang said after he was released.
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