Thousands of people stood in line to make a “human chain” last night along Taipei’s Xinyi Road and turned on the flashlight applications on their smartphones at 8:14pm to show support for former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairman Lin I-hsiung (林義雄), who was in the third day of a hunger strike against the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant.
As the participants turned on the flashlights and pointed their mobile phones toward the sky, they started chanting: “Terminate the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in 2014.”
The time of the action was chosen to symbolize that the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District (貢寮) must be terminated by the end of this year.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
The campaign was organized by the DPP, which called for anti-nuclear activists to form a 2.4km-long human chain, which from the street across from the site of Lin’s hunger strike — Gikong Presbyterian Church — along Xinyi Road and which ended on Ketagalan Boulevard, where the Presidential Office Building is located.
The crowd chanted the slogan for about three minutes before moving toward Ketagalan Boulevard, where they gathered for a rally and sit-in, demanding that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to bow to mainstream public opinion and halt the construction.
DPP Chairman Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) and other party heavyweights, including former premiers Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) and Yu Shyi-kun, reiterated that the DPP was determined to phase out nuclear power and eventually achieve a nuclear-free homeland, a goal listed in the party’s charter.
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
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
Taiwanese singer Jay Chou (周杰倫) plans to take to the courts of the Australian Open for the first time as a competitor in the high-stakes 1 Point Slam. The Australian Open yesterday afternoon announced the news on its official Instagram account, welcoming Chou — who celebrates his 47th birthday on Sunday — to the star-studded lineup of the tournament’s signature warm-up event. “From being the King of Mandarin Pop filling stadiums with his music to being Kato from The Green Hornet and now shifting focus to being a dedicated tennis player — welcome @jaychou to the 1 Point Slam and #AusOpen,” the
RSS