Members of the Control Yuan on Monday urged the Mainland Affairs Council to talk with its Chinese counterpart about the problem of Chinese garbage accumulating on the shores of the Matsu Islands and hurting tourism.
The Control Yuan first became aware of the problem when a delegation of members visited Beigan Township (北竿) in Matsu in March.
A local council member told the delegation that garbage from China washing ashore was a serious problem that the local government could not resolve.
The council member said that if the problem is not solved, Matsu’s touted ecotourism industry would be devastated.
On Monday, Control Yuan members Wang Mei-yu (王美玉), Chiang Chi-wen (江綺雯) and Pao Tsung-ho (包宗和) joined officials from the Environmental Protection Administration and the local council on a tour of the affected areas in Matsu.
Upon returning to Taipei, the three said that Kinmen, Matsu and China’s coastal cities have formed a “one-day living quarters” — where people can visit each other and return home within a single day — so the two sides should forge a consensus on environmental issues and other concerns in the daily lives of residents.
Among the three major issues between the two sides — the poaching of fish, the harvesting of sand and the accumulation of garbage — garbage seems to have been given the least attention by Chinese authorities, they said.
The council should talk to Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) to search for a solution to the problem, Wang said.
“Only by stopping the garbage flow from the very source in China can we hope to solve the problem,” she said, urging the council to negotiate a solution with the TAO.
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