Attempts to protect the renowned columnar basalt formation at Daguoyeh near Chihdong Township (池東)in Penghu County have been met with opposition as the owners of the land have refused to sell to the county government, the Penghu National Scenic Area Administration said yesterday.
The landowners said they would not sell as they wanted to preserve their ancestral properties, but were amenable to leasing the land under certain conditions, the administration said.
The formation has been defaced with drawings, and damaged by climbers and people swimming in pools around it, but the administration has been unable to prevent the activities as the land is privately owned, the administration said.
Photo: Liu Yu-ching, Taipei Times
The formation stretches across nine plots of land, with only two plots, comprising only 5.42 percent of the total landmass, belonging to the government, the Penghu Country Government said.
The other seven plots of land, including three belonging to former news anchor Su Yi-hung (蘇逸洪), make up the other 94.58 percent, the county government said.
The county government has budgeted NT$11.2 million (US$381,134) to purchase the land, but only Su has agreed to sell his three plots, which amount to 1,582m2, for NT$4.9 million.
The county government said it has purchased the land at the price Su bought it for in 2007.
However, the other landowners have said they do not wish to part with their ancestral land and have protested the county government’s offer to expropriate the land, adding that their families’ mining activities caused the formation.
They said they were willing to lease the land to the county government if the government agrees not to build any structures on their land.
The county government said it is mulling their offer while making plans for the parts of the land that it now owns.
The country government plans to complete its amelioration of the area by March or April next year, it said.
It plans to install railings and other preventive measures to help conserve the natural scenery, the county government said.
The county government said it would also be taking mobile restrooms from the Daguoyeh Security Center and installing them at the site.
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