More than 1,000 residents of Changhua County’s Puyan (埔鹽), Fusing (福興) and Siushui (秀水) townships yesterday held a meeting to protest a proposed crematorium.
Emotions ran high during the meeting, with residents running to the podium and falling on their knees to beg Puyan Township Mayor Yang Fu-chien (楊福建) to stop the county government building the crematorium at the proposed Puyan site. He fell on his knees in response and vowed to prevent the construction.
Self-help association chief executive director Shih Yu-ming (施瑜銘) said that Changhua County Commissioner Wei Ming-ku’s (魏明谷) push for a crematorium was overturned in a previous meeting and included a promise that any crematorium would have to be agreed to by at least half of the local residents.
Photo: Yen Hung-chun, Taipei Times
He called the Changhua County Government’s decisionmaking process opaque and secretive, adding that the crematorium would endanger the drinking water for more than 100,000 residents because it was located next to an industrial park housing a water processing plant.
The crematorium could also create traffic congestion on a neighboring highway because residents would have to compete with traffic coming out of the industrial park, he said.
In response to residents’ concerns, the county government’s Department of Civil Affairs said that the site had been selected because it was convenient and close to the county’s geographic center.
However, the county government would pay close attention to public opinion and have a full discussion with residents before deciding on a final plan, the department said, adding that any decision would be transparent and based on public opinion.
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