Several environmentalists yesterday accused Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lin Te-fu (林德福) of benefiting from a revision to construction plans on a section of the MRT’s Wanda line, a planned addition to the MRT mass rapid transit system that serves metropolitan Taipei.
The environmentalists held banners that read: “Lin — one of the ‘four bandits’ — is wrongly profiting” and “The MRT Wanda line’s Environmental Impact Assessment [EIA] report is a forgery.”
Lin has been named by student-led protesters against the government’s handling of cross-strait service trade agreement, as one of “four major bandits” for following President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) orders to the letter as opposed to listening to the opinions of the public.
According to the environmentalists, the plans for a section of the Wanda line in Yonghe District (永和), New Taipei City, gained approval at an EIA specialists’ meeting late last month, but the revised route will require that tens of billions of New Taiwan dollars be added to the project’s construction budget and pollution prevention measures were not clearly explained in its EIA report.
Taiwan Water Resources Protection Union spokesperson Wu Li-huei (吳麗慧) said the revisions have relocated a station to a spot in front of Yong Ping Elementary School, and an additional 700m of track are to pass through an old landfill site in the area.
The revisions would cause pollution in the area by disturbing the landfill site, Wu said, adding that the union was skeptical about the EIA report because it lacked clear waste removal and cleanup measures.
She said that the union also had questions over whether the revisions were made to benefit Lin, because the revised route passes through land owned by the lawmaker.
In response, Lin’s office said the legislator had no part in the revisions to the construction project.
Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Administration said that although the project gained initial approval at the specialists’ meeting, it still needs to be discussed in an EIA assembly meeting.
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