In a bid to encourage youngsters to engage in healthier activities during the summer, the Executive Yuan yesterday decided to offer incentives to public and private schools to open their campuses during holidays and after school.
"Facilities located at schools, communities and government buildings should be open to the public as much as possible under the premise that their safety and daily activities are safeguarded," Cabinet Spokesman Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) quoted Premier Yu Shyi-kun as saying yesterday morning.
To encourage public and private high schools to comply with the measure, Lin said, the Cabinet will offer a subsidy of up to NT$4 million to each school. Interested private colleges and universities will also receive subsidies from the Ministry of Education.
Yu made the remarks yesterday morning during the weekly closed-door Cabinet meeting after listening to the briefing presented by the education ministry.
According to a report made available by the ministry, about 80 percent of the public colleges and universities open their doors during summer vacations, while 19 percent are closed.
While 74, or 83 percent, of all private colleges' and universities' sports facilities are accessible to the public during summer vacations, the grounds of 15, or 17 percent, are not.
As for high schools, while 80 percent, or 226, of the nation's public and private schools' sports facilities are available during summer vacations, 20 percent, or 64, are not.
Yu also approved the ministry's proposal that public high schools charge facility users a fee. These funds, however, have to be used for maintenance and cleaning of the facilities.
The ministry's report was prompted by a complaint filed by Minister of Justice Chen Ding-nan (
According to a close aide of Taipei City Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who delivered a report on the city's handling of Chen's complaint during yesterday's Cabinet meeting, Chen's son was denied access to his alma mater, Chung Cheng Junior High School, where he had planned to play basketball.
After listening to the report from the sports council, Yu yesterday approved the council's plan to organize 92 land, air and water sports activities during the summer.
The program will attract an estimated 1 million youngsters.
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