Taipei’s Department of Transportation has failed to fix some of the city’s most dangerous road intersections, two city councilors said yesterday.
Democratic Progressive Party councilors Wang Wei-chung (王威中) and Kao Chia-yu (高嘉瑜) said that two of the 10 most dangerous intersections listed by the department in 2013 again topped the list for last year.
“The department should have taken measures to reduce accidents at these intersections, but these same intersections continued to top the list [last year] as accidents increased,” Wang said.
According to department statistics, accidents at the intersection of Civic Boulevard and Zhongshan N Road — the city’s most dangerous — increased 28 percent last year to 69 cases.
There were 62 accidents at the intersection of Zhongxiao W Road and Zhonghua Road, a 29 percent increase.
Wang said the figures showed that the department’s measures have been ineffective in improving traffic safety, adding that overall accidents for the 10 most dangerous intersections increased last year.
Traffic Safety Division head Chen Kuan-lung (陳冠龍) said that the number of accidents at the two intersections last year did not reflect improvements made by the city because they were only completed in November due to their complicated nature and the need to wait for the Songshan MRT line to begin operations.
He added that accidents at the other eight most dangerous intersections in 2013 all fell significantly last year.
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