Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) lawmakers yesterday said that at least three government agencies have refused to move into a new government building and chose instead to pay rent to stay at their current location because they prefer to stay in downtown Taipei.
The Ministry of Culture, the Council of Indigenous Peoples and the Council of Labor Affairs would rather pay a total of more than NT$200 million (US$6.7 million) a year of taxpayers’ money on rent than move to a joint government office building that is being built in Sinjhuang District (新莊), New Taipei City (新北市), and which is scheduled for completion in June, TSU Legislator Lin Shih-chia (林世嘉) told a press conference.
The new building was built to house four ministries and other agencies with a total of 2,700 government employees with the aim of saving public funds and increasing efficiency, TSU Legislator Hsu Chung-hsin (許忠信) said.
In response to an inquiry by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Gao Jyh-peng (高志鵬) in a plenary session yesterday afternoon, Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) pledged that all government agencies would move into the building in the second half of the year as planned.
The average annual rent for government agencies in the past five years has been about NT$2.2 billion, including NT$963 million for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and about NT$120 million each for the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of the Interior, TSU Legislator Huang Wen-ling (黃文玲) said.
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