President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) called for the enactment of a national land planning law yesterday as part of an effort to prevent a repeat of the disaster that followed Typhoon Morakot in August.
The law should put public safety first and prohibit or restrict the development of vulnerable areas, Ma said in his National Day address at the Presidential Office.
Morakot claimed at least 700 lives in early August and caused Taiwan’s worst flooding in 50 years. Ma was forced to reshuffle the Cabinet early last month over criticism of his government because of its slow response to the Morakot aftermath. Then-premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) resigned to take responsibility for the delayed evacuation of people living in mountain villages.
Ma yesterday said that climate change should be taken into consideration when reconstructing Morakot disaster areas and rebuilding waterways, as well as in land management planning.
Another lesson that Taiwan has learned from the typhoon is that disaster preparedness is more important than disaster relief, he said.
The government has therefore launched reforms of current disaster preparedness systems, with a focus on strengthening coordination and communications between central and local governments, training and drilling local government units in disaster preparedness measures and raising awareness of the importance of disaster preparedness, Ma said.
“If we prepare for every typhoon as a possible Morakot and every outbreak of infectious disease as another SARS epidemic, then the damage can certainly be reduced,” he said.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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