Taipei City councilors have criticized the city government for failing to relocate lanterns installed in Zhongshan District’s (中山) Xingguo Park after the Lantern Festival concluded, leading to a “marring of the park’s natural environment.”
The city government had earlier approved that the statue-shaped lanterns may be reused in an exhibition within the park that followed on from the festival.
However, Taipei Councilor Chen Li-hui (陳孋輝) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) said this decision had not adequately dealt with the problem, which continued to detract from the scenery in the local park.
Photo provided by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Chen Li-hui
Residents have complained that the lanterns, of varying size and posture, scare local children when lit up at night.
Chen added that the mess of electric lines hitched across the trees and around the statues was an eyesore which conflicted with the natural beauty of the park.
In response, Taipei City government’s head of the department of civil affairs, Huang Lu Chin-ju (黃呂錦茹), said that, as was customary after the festival, a number of organizations had been asked to adopt the lanterns.
Included this year are Yang-Ming Home for the Disabled, the Taipei City Zoo, the Hakka Cultural Theme Park, the Taipei Water Department and other communal parks, religious organizations and corporations.
However, Huang Lu said that because several lanterns this year were made from tougher material than in previous years, the city government had decided that they could be placed in public areas for longer.
Local borough offices have now filed the necessary paperwork to “adopt” out the lanterns to other organizations, Huang Lu said.
Huang Lu said that the residents who were scared of the lanterns may be in a minority, but added that she would visit the park herself to better understand the situation.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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