A Singaporean community leader on Saturday said that the city-state could learn from Taipei when it comes to keeping its streets clean, praising the Taiwanese capital for its cleanliness.
William Wan, general secretary of the non-profit Singapore Kindness Movement, wrote in an opinion piece in the Singapore-based Straits Times that perhaps the city-state has “too many cleaners” and that this has spoiled Singaporeans. He called for an end to the city-state’s “vicious circle of littering.”
The cofounder of the Keep Singapore Clean Movement lamented in the article that last week’s New Year Day celebrations saw more garbage littered on the streets of Singapore than in the previous three years, with Styrofoam cups, bottles and cigarette packs discarded only a meter from empty trashcans.
In comparison, Wan said that Taipei “is much cleaner than [Singapore], even though there are very few rubbish bins in public places.”
Singapore has a population of about 5 million and employs 70,000 cleaners, while Taipei has less than 3 million residents, but only 5,000 cleaners, Wan wrote in the article.
He added that when Keep Singapore Clean representatives visited Taipei weeks ago, their hosts had explained the phenomenon by saying: “We clean up after ourselves.”
The Chinese-language Apple Daily reported that the crowds at last week’s New Year’s celebrations in Taipei had produced about 19.47 tonnes of trash, all of which was cleaned up in one hour by 562 sanitation workers and about 1,000 volunteers.
The previous year, the Taiwan Environmental Information Center estimates that the about 1.16 million people rang in the new year in Taipei produced 22.63 tonnes of trash.
In the 2013 celebrations, about 850,000 revelers produced 14.09 tonnes of trash, the nonprofit group said on its Web site.
Except for the areas around markets, public trash cans are rare on Taipei’s crowded streets, but littering is uncommon because handling one’s own trash is considered a civic responsibility.
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