Taipei and the Chinese city of Xian launched a cooperative effort yesterday that will see a horticultural exposition held in Xian three days after the Taipei International Flora Expo concludes in April next year.
As a result of the joint effort and through exchanges between the two cities, Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) said he hoped environmental protection would take root and a win-win scenario would be created.
“To join heaven and man is an important concept of the thousands-year-old history of the Chinese nation,” Hau said. “To attach great importance to the environment is to realize such a concept.”
PHOTO:CNA
Xian Mayor Chen Baogen (陳寶根) said the joint effort bore significant meaning in the cooperation and exchange between “Shaanxi Province and Taiwan, and Xian and Taipei.”
Despite the warm words inside, the Chinese delegation were greeted by Falun Gong practitioners on their way out of the hotel where the announcement was made.
Calling Shaanxi Vice Governor and acting Governor Zhao Zhengyong (趙正永) the “scum of human rights,” the protesters said Zhao was not welcome in Taiwan because he had ordered the killing of many Falun Gong members.
Strangely enough, the protesters were not stopped by city personnel or the Chinese delegation, but rather by the bus driver transporting the Chinese delegation.
They engaged in physical clashes when the driver tried to stop the protesters from holding a banner that read “Persecution of Falun Gong, Zhao Zhengyong, you are charged with a criminal offense.”
On Monday, Falun Gong members filed a complaint at the Taiwan High Court Prosecutors' Office and they planned to sue Chinese Administration of Religious Affairs Director Wang Zuoan (王作安) today.
The 500-member delegation, led by Zhao, is the largest and highest-ranking delegation from the northwestern Chinese province to have visited Taiwan, and is scheduled to attend various events at this year's Taiwan-Shaanxi Week, held between yesterday and Sunday.
During a meeting with Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Honorary Chairman Wu Po-hsiung (吳伯雄), Zhao said his delegation — the first Chinese group to visit Taiwan since the cross-strait Economic Cooperation Framework agreement (ECFA) took effect on Sunday — will do its best to help implement the trade pact.
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