As residents on Hehuanshan (合歡山) brace for a snowy winter, the army has sent a detachment of two CM-21 armored personnel carriers to the region as a reserve disaster relief force, a defense official said on Monday.
The tracked CM-21 can drive on icy roads, which are anticipated for the high-altitude area during winter, said the official, who declined to be named.
Formed of vehicles and soldiers from the 586th Armored Brigade of the 10th Army Corps, the detachment has been tasked with conducting rescue, evacuation or materiel transportation missions from an army base in Wuling (武嶺) on Hehuanshan, the official said.
Photo courtesy of Yu Hsin-chih
Soldiers assigned to the detachment have familiarized themselves with the terrain; trained extensively in driving in snow, first aid and the use of ropes; established a liaison with local first responders; and rehearsed response plans, the official said.
In related news, the Forestry Bureau’s Taitung District Office said that it has rescinded a decision to close Chiaming Lake National Trail (嘉明湖國家步道) to visitors next month and in February on a provisional basis.
Since 2015, the office has adopted the practice of closing the trail for several months during winter to reduce the environmental impact of visitors and to give workers time to clean up the area.
However, the policy has not been popular among hikers and campers, who would like to visit the trail when there is snowfall, forestry officials said.
Although the closure period was last year decreased from three months to two months, the concession failed to appease hikers, who flooded the Web site of the trail’s management office with complaints, they said.
The district office is to hold public meetings to strike a balance between the public’s desire to visit the trail during the winter and its obligation to protect the environment, district office official Lin Mung-yi (林孟怡) 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