Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday urged Taipei Dome contractor Farglory Group to honor its word and complete a construction license change for the Taipei Dome complex in accordance with the law, after the conglomerate again sparked turmoil over the build-operate-transfer (BOT) project.
Farglory spokesman Jacky Yang (楊舜欽) — just seven hours after Ko announced his decision to retain the contract on Thursday — said that the company would abide by “existing” provisions in the safety review processes for the complex, and the seven safety standards, which Farglory says have no legal basis, do not fall within that category.
Yang targeted a comment by Taipei Department of Urban Development Commissioner Lin Jou-min (林洲民), who said that the standards were based on provisions that apply to “Taipei, the nation and Farglory,” saying that the conglomerate disagrees with Lin’s claim and that it would not comply with any reviews carried out according to the “illegitimate” standards.
“I hope that Farglory would value its reputation,” Ko said in response to reporters’ questions on the sidelines of a news conference yesterday.
“We will use the commitments that they laid down in black and white as the central reference,” Ko said, citing a letter of consent Farglory delivered to the Taipei City Government on Wednesday, stating its willingness to finish the project according to the city’s bylaws.
Despite saying that he would not comment on this issue, Ko could not contain his frustration with his predecessor, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) vice chairman Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌), when asked by reporters about a swipe Hau had taken at him on Thursday, after Ko announced that the BOT contract was to be continued.
Hau said that Ko had been “hatching an egg” — a play on “big egg,” the Chinese phrase for dome-shaped stadiums — for 500 days, but all that he brought forth was a “Psyduck,” a character in the hit mobile game Pokemon Go that is widely said to bear a resemblance to Ko.
“Let me tell you: I am only cleaning up the mess [Hau] left behind,” Ko 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
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