In preparation for an anti-nuclear parade this afternoon, the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union — which is organizing the protest — and a number of Aboriginal activists staged a demonstration on Ketagalan Boulevard in front of the Presidential Office in Taipei yesterday morning.
The activists said the parade expressed their determination to prevent nuclear waste from being disposed of in Aboriginal areas.
Sending up smoke signals on Ketagalan Boulevard reflected the traditional signaling method used by the nation’s Aboriginal tribes, the anti-nuclear activists said, adding that the action was taken to summon more people to participate in today’s parade.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
“When natural disasters occur, or when Aboriginal tribes are being attacked by their enemies, the head of the tribe gathers young people to light a fire as quickly as they can,” and the smoke from the fire is used to call for help an Amis Aborigine said.
Jiru Haruq, a priest from Hualien County’s Sioulin Township (秀林), said that one of the sites being considered as a spent nuclear fuel repository is in Sioulin, but when Taiwan Power Co carried out exploratory drilling at the site for evaluation purposes, it only told the village head that the drilling was for making tunnels.
It is wrong of the government to take advantage of people’s lack of knowledge about nuclear power and seek to dispose of nuclear waste in these areas, he added.
Nuclear-Free Homeland Alliance executive director Lee Cho-han (李卓翰) said the government should not think about expanding the use of nuclear power when it has not solved the problem of nuclear waste disposal.
The assembly point for the anti-nuclear parade is at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall at 2pm today.
The parade will set out at 3pm and is scheduled to reach Ketagalan Boulevard at 5pm, where an evening event will be held until 8pm.
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