Calling for the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) to suspend the execution of the latest, “illegal” environmental impact assessment (EIA) of the Miramar Resort Village in Taitung County, a dozen representatives from nine civic environmental groups yesterday presented their requests in front of the administration.
Organized by Citizen of the Earth, Taiwan (CET), the groups said the Supreme Administrative Court had already reached a final verdict which declared the EIA conclusion of the beachfront Miramar Resort project in Taitung County’s Shanyuan Bay (杉原灣) invalid earlier last year, but the local government neglected the ruling and held another controversial EIA meeting that gave approval in December last year.
The groups said that because the latest EIA meeting was conducted illegally and Miramar said it would commence trial operations in May, they said they had already filed a complaint to the EPA on March 5 and that they were making another formal request yesterday morning asking the administration to put a stop to what they called “the worst development case in the history of Taiwan’s environmental issues.”
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
“It was an invalid EIA meeting ... and if it is allowed, it will set a bad precedent for future cases, demolishing the EIA system,” said Thomas Chan (詹順貴), an attorney affiliated with the Primordial Law Firm who works closely with environmental groups.
“I believe the EIA conclusion will be withdrawn again if the lawsuit goes to administrative court,” he said.
Chan said that the conclusion was illegal because the case was not reviewed at the central government level, as it should have been according to administrative procedures, the review committee members did not avoid conflicts of interest, the case was evaluated on a continuing basis rather than starting fresh and the conclusion gained conditional approval but lacked provisos, he said.
Taiwan Environmental Protection Union academic committee convener Gloria Hsu (徐光蓉) accused the EPA of allowing developers to apply to alter the restrictions of the EIA’s conditional approval and urged the Miramar Resort Village to stop destroying the beach.
Aboriginal folk singer Takanow (達卡鬧), the convener of an alliance against the Miramar project, said the alliance was worried that a domino effect will lead to more such development projects along Taiwan’s east coast bypassing their EIAs, and said local residents want jobs compatible with environmental protection, unlike the ones provided by the resort.
He and Lin Shu-ling (林淑玲), an Amis Aborigine who lives in the area, said that some local people are planning a social movement encompassing environmental and Aboriginal issues along the east coast in a walk from Taitung County to Taipei next month.
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