Residents from Kaohsiung’s Cishan (旗山) and Neimen (內門) Districts rallied in front of the Kaohsiung District Prosecutors’ Office on Friday to file charges against the city government for allegedly favoring a waste processor that plans to build a landfill for industrial waste at the foot of Matou Mountain (馬頭山).
The residents, led by a local self-help group, pressed charges against Fuchun Corp (富駿事業股份有限公司) for allegedly constructing a road at the foot of the mountain without authorization.
The group said a development application the company submitted to the city government stated that it would renovate a 200m farm road at the premises, but it had actually constructed a road that is more than 1500m long and has slopes with more than a 50° gradient.
The road was allegedly illegally built without the city government’s approval and the company failed to conduct water and soil conservation at the site, leading to soil loss and exposed tree roots in the area, the group said.
The city government was included on the lawsuit for purportedly shielding and catering to the interest of the waste processor, the group said, adding it had filed many petitions with the government, but were only given perfunctory responses.
The protest and legal action were the latest of a series of protests against the proposed landfill project, as local residents said the proposed site is upstream of the Erren River (二仁溪), near the Agongdian Reservoir (阿公店水庫) and could pose a threat to the municipality’s water quality if toxic waste were dumped at the site.
In a meeting with local residents at Cishan on Aug. 19, Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) said the landfill project was rejected by the city government’s environmental impact assessment committee and the company had not yet filed a reapplication.
Kaohsiung Water Resources Bureau on Friday said that it had conducted an inspection at the road construction site following residents’ complaints and found defective on-site management, such as poor drainage systems and slope protection, but no illegal activity as claimed by the residents.
In response, Fuchun Corp said in a statement that it had conducted all construction in accordance with city government regulations, and that it withholds the right to sue the self-help group for its allegations and trespassing on company property.
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