About 500 people from Hsiaokang District protested yesterday in front of the Kaohsiung City Government, urging Mayor Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) not to issue a license to a newly-completed medical incinerator installed next to their communities.
Waving banners, demonstrators shouted to express their anger at the establishment of the incinerator, which stands as close as 300m to some homes. The protesters included senior citizens who joined the demonstration with their grandchildren in tow.
Representatives handed over the results of an advisory referendum held on Dec. 7 to city government officials. The result indicated that 97.8 percent of the 7,187 people who cast votes were opposed to the incinerator.
"No matter what anyone says, this result reflects real public opinion. Our protest will only get bigger if the city government insists on issuing a license to the operator," Fengming borough chief Huang Chun-fu (
Sixty-one percent of the 11,778 eligible voters in the six boroughs near the incinerator participated in the poll.
The referendum was conducted by a committee made up of borough chiefs, community leaders and representatives of environmental and cultural groups. Many of these people have been protesting against the incinerator, designed to dispose of infectious medical waste, for more than two years.
According to the protesters, the location of the incinerator was objectionable -- the distance from the incinerator to the six boroughs ranges between 300m and 900m.
Protesters also said that Hsiaokang residents had been discriminated against for decades. They alleged that a number of environmentally-unfriendly facilities had been built there over the years, including steelmaking furnaces in a nearby industrial complex and a large household-waste incinerator with a daily capacity of 1,800 tonnes.
In response to the demonstration, Deputy Mayor Lin Yung-chien (林永堅) said the application process had been processed over five years and met applicable standards.
"We've worked very hard over the last two years to communicate with the residents, and have said that the city will form a special task force to monitor the incinerator's operation in future," Lin said.
A statutory deadline for the government's evaluation of the application falls on Jan. 11.
Mayor Hsieh said that the government had spent more than five years carefully evaluating the project and that the facility met standards required of it in a five-day trial in September.
"Under the circumstances, the residents should not have any need to speculate on the operation of the incinerator," Hsieh said.
Huang, however, said that the conclusions reached at a public hearing held by the operator in March, 1999, had been fabricated because most residents opposed the project.
Mayor Hsieh had promised not to issue an operator license until matters concerning people over the issue were clarified.
Huang and other representatives said they would not raise any objection if the city government relocated the incinerator.
Hsieh was reluctant to respond to this idea yesterday.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
US President Donald Trump said "it’s up to" Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be "very unhappy" with a change in the "status quo," the New York Times said in an interview published yesterday. Xi "considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing," Trump told the newspaper on Wednesday. "But I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that," he added. "I hope he doesn’t do that." Trump made the comments in
Tourism in Kenting fell to a historic low for the second consecutive year last year, impacting hotels and other local businesses that rely on a steady stream of domestic tourists, the latest data showed. A total of 2.139 million tourists visited Kenting last year, down slightly from 2.14 million in 2024, the data showed. The number of tourists who visited the national park on the Hengchun Peninsula peaked in 2015 at 8.37 million people. That number has been below 2.2 million for two years, although there was a spike in October last year due to multiple long weekends. The occupancy rate for hotels
RSS