The Directorate-General of Highways (DGH) said it plans to announce a list of excellent coach operators this month and a list of bad ones next month.
The DGH has evaluated coach operators every two years since 2008 and the latest evaluation was expected to be released at the end of the year.
After a tour bus caught fire on a freeway in Taoyuan on Tuesday last week, killing all 26 people on board, Minister of Transportation and Communications Hochen Tan (賀陳旦) said the latest information about coach operators must be released as soon as possible, especially the lists of good and bad ones.
The DGH plans to release the list of excellent operators on Thursday. As for bad coach operators, records are to be provided of their involvement in traffic accidents and any infractions against administrative rules.
There are about 940 coach operators, operating about 17,000 coaches, agency data showed.
Taoyuan District prosecutor Wang Yi-wen (王以文) on Sunday said that five containers, including two that were burned in the ill-fated bus, have been found to contain traces of gasoline footprint, while the carpet in the bus was also found to have gasoline traces after forensic examination.
However, the cause of the bus fire has still not been discovered, Wang said.
Some experts on Wednesday last week said that a fuse box at the front of the bus had melted, suggesting a possible power overload leading to an electrical short circuit.
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:
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