Taiwan English 
March 28, 2018 
By: Phillip Charlier  

Police are on the hunt for three daredevils who climbed to the top of a 135.75 meter high tower on New Taipei Bridge in Sanchong District of New Taipei City recently.

Photographs of the stunt were uploaded to an Instagram account belonging to a 21 year old student named Lee Hansheng, who attends National Taiwan College of Performing Arts. Lee is known as a street performer and has taken similar high-altitude photographs in Japan, Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong.

Many Chinese language media reports claim the three young men were imitating foreign extreme sports players when they stood on a 50 centimeter ledge on the top of the bridge tower, the equivalent of 40 stories from the ground. The men did not have any safety equipment.    [FULL  STORY]

Radio Taiwan International
Date: 2018-03-28

President Tsai Ing-wen says the government is working to ensure Taiwan retains an edge

in smart technology. At the opening of a tech show in Taipei on Tuesday, she highlighted the ways her administration aims to keep the country ahead of the curve.

President Tsai Ing-wen opened the 2018 Smart City Summit & Expo on Tuesday. Following a ribbon-cutting ceremony, she visited booths to learn about Taiwanese companies’ latest work developing smart applications.

Tsai said the government is providing opportunities to apply smart technology in different areas of life. She said smart applications have already been applied to social housing. Meanwhile, local governments around the country have adopted smart technology in the areas of disaster prevention, energy, transportation, and long-term care.
[FULL  STORY]

32 corporations and groups join hands with government to offer info at stores and online

Taiwan News 
Date: 2018/03/28
By: Matthew Strong, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – The CEO of I-Mei Foods Co. (義美食品), Luis Ko (高志明), and movie director Wu Nien-chen (吳念真) led an alliance of 32 corporations and organizations Wednesday to launch a prevention campaign against illegal drugs.

The campaign answered a call by the Taiwan Advertising Council for its member companies to include drugs prevention as part of their operations and to cooperate with the government. The organizers presented their campaign at a news conference at the Ministry of Justice Wednesday morning.

Ko, who also chairs the Taiwan Advertising Council, drew a parallel with the era of Japanese occupation, when opium was a plague which incurred the anger of democracy activist Chiang Wei-shui (蔣渭水).    [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2018/03/28
By: Kuan-lin Liu

Taipei, March 28 (CNA) A magnitude 4.8 earthquake struck Yilan County in eastern Taiwan at 6:29 p.m. Wednesday, the Central Weather Bureau (CWB) reported shortly after the temblor.

The epicenter of the earthquake was located about 23.5 kilometers east southeast of the Yilan County government office at a depth of 70.3 km, the bureau’s Seismology Center said.    [FULL  STORY]

Taipei Times
Date: Mar 29, 2018
By: Staff writer, with CNA

A number of environmental groups yesterday protested outside the Executive Yuan in

Taipei to demand that the government withdraw its plan to open the rebuilt coal-fired Shenao Power Plant in New Taipei City.

About 50 people from organizations including the Green Citizens’ Action Alliance, Greenpeace, the Homemakers United Foundation and Citizen of the Earth, Taiwan carried signs reading “Withdraw” and demanded that a representative of the Cabinet come out and face the crowd.

Tsai Ya-ying (蔡雅瀅), an attorney with the Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association, criticized the process by which the Environmental Protection Administration’s (EPA) Environmental Impact Assessment Committee conducted the review that led to the decision to expand and open the power plant.

The process was flawed on many counts, Tsai said, including the many alterations to the proposal made by state-run utility Taiwan Power Co which had made it necessary for the project to be re-evaluated.    [FULL  STORY]

Mountain villages are slow to adapt to the fallout of their newfound consumerism.

The News Lens
Date: 2018/03/27
By Hsu Le (徐樂), TNL Staff

I think for most people like me, the first time we come in contact with nature, our impressions are sweeping vistas and deep seas; a sense of wonder that pervades the senses. When I studied abroad, I was always impressed by the pure, unspoilt nature of national parks. When I returned home to Taiwan, I snorkeled in Lanyu Island through crystal-clear seas and a whole textbook worth of fish.

Maybe this raised my expectations too much; I developed a constant urge to go further into the wilderness, which is how I ended up in a mountain village in Taiwan’s eastern Taitung County during the course of my mandatory military service.

Before arriving in the small village of Jialian (嘉蘭), I had more experience in the mountains of the United States than in Taiwan itself; it would be a new experience in these cold stone houses.    [FULL  STORY]

Taiwan News  
Date: 2018/03/27
By: George Liao, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

TAIPEI (Taiwan News)–Tai-mountain National Scenic Area held activities on March 24 and

25 at Bagua Mountain Ecosystems Visitor Center in central Taiwan to promote local tourism, attracting a total of 6,500 visitors, according to the scenic area office.

The activities included an eagle-theme concert, which took place in the afternoon of March 24. About 1,340 visitors attended the concert which featured performances from National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra, Anka Phaway from South America, and famous Taiwanese singer Samson Shih. Eagle-themed songs from 11 countries were performed in the concert.

Besides the concert, the scenic area office also organized free shuttle buses to provide free guided tours to the nearby city of Changhua. A total of 1,058 visitors took the bus to visit characteristic stores in the city.    [FULL  STORY]

Focus Taiwan
Date: 2018/03/27
By: Elaine Hou and Ko Li 

Taipei, March 27 (CNA) Taiwan’s foreign ministry said Tuesday it has lodged a complaint with Forbes magazine over a misleading article that describes wages in Taiwan as comparable to those of Mexico.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) has lodged a formal complaint with the magazine and asked it to rectify the problem, MOFA spokesman Andrew Lee (李憲章) told CNA.

Titled “Why Taiwan’s wages are as low as Mexico’s,” the article published on March 19 claimed that the average monthly salary of Taiwanese workers was US$1,288 last year, which is a few dollars higher than Mexican workers, who made US$1,276 per month.

However, the wage figure for Taiwan quoted in the Forbes article does not include overtime pay and bonuses, and was not calculated based on purchasing power parity (PPP), as the Mexican figure was, according to an earlier MOFA release.   [FULL STORY]