Chimes that welcome customers are to be banned in July at the earliest in convenience stores in Taipei from late night to early morning to curb noise pollution, the Taipei Department of Environmental Protection said yesterday.
According to a forthcoming departmental noise-control bylaw, convenience store jingles are to be prohibited citywide from 10pm to 8am, with violators subject to a fine of between NT$3,000 and NT$30,000, department division head Yan Ling-chen (顏伶珍) said.
Noise-control inspectors can issue fines to violators directly without measuring decibel levels, she added.
The department drafted the bylaw based on the Noise Control Act (噪音管制法) after receiving 12 complaints about convenience store welcome chimes and 624 complaints about election campaigns over the past year, she said.
In January, the four major convenience store chains were given three months to address noise complaints and “pledged to comply with the new regulation to take on corporate social responsibility,” she said.
With a high density of convenience stores in residential areas in Taipei, and with outlets operating around the clock, the electronic door chimes — although generally producing sounds that fall within permissible noise levels — have become a nuisance in quiet neighborhoods, she said.
Residents usually lodge complaints with the department if they have failed to reach an understanding with store operators about noise control, she said.
The bylaw extends to megaphones and sound amplifiers commonly used during election campaigns, which are also prohibited from 10pm to 8am, with violators subject to the same punishment, she said.
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
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