■ Education
More foreigners to be hired
Head of the British Council, Taipei Office Gordon Slaven signed a service contract
for recruiting foreign English teachers yesterday with Lau Ching-jen (劉慶仁), head of the Cultural Division of Taipei Representative Office in the UK, who represented the Bureau of International and Educational Relations. The UK is now the second country to recruit qualified English teachers, following Canada. The British government will recruit native speakers with qualification in teaching before Oct. 31 to fill 70 posts. Qualified candidates are expected to start teaching
next February. Bureau officials said the
new teachers would probably teach in remote areas. Those schools which can provide accommodation for the teachers will be given first consideration.
■ Military Affairs
Ethnic balance changes
Retired soldiers from the Taiwanese and Hakka ethnic groups account for more than half of the total of some 530,000 veterans, officials from the Veterans Affairs Commission (VAC) said yesterday. The officials made the remarks at a seminar
on ethnic integration held
to discuss issues concerning cross-strait marriages and veterans going to China for settlement. In the past, the mainlanders who retreated to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) in 1949 made up the bulk of veterans,
but commission Chairman
Kao Hua-chu (高華柱) said yesterday that as of the end of last year, there were more than 282,000 veterans from the Taiwanese and Hakka ethnic groups, surpassing one half of the total of around 530,000. There were also around 7,500 veterans from Aboriginal groups.
■ Politics
DPP will court Lee
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) will invite
former president Lee Teng-
hui (李登輝) to stump for its candidates in December's legislative elections, DPP secretary-general Chang Chun-hsiung (張俊雄) said yesterday. Chang said
the DPP and the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) are partners and that both parties had cooperated in many areas in the past. He said it was inevitable that there would
be competition between the parties during the year-end elections, and noted that a portion of supporters for the two parties overlapped. He added that the DPP would "properly handle its relations with the TSU." Chang said that it was undeniable that Lee, the spiritual leader of
the TSU, was a trump card
for that party in its election campaign, but that the DPP would still invite him to stump for DPP candidates.
■ Trade
Outlets to open in Japan
The nation has its sights on expanding its international presence in farm and aquacultural produce, with the Council of Agriculture paying particular attention
to the Japanese market,
a council spokesman said yesterday. The council
plans to open "fine Taiwan agricultural produce centers" in Tokyo and Osaka to introduce the produce in Japan, he said. In line with a set of promotional guidelines and packages for overseas sales, the council has recently targeted star fruit, papaya and guava for overseas markets. In addition, moth orchids, oolong tea, mangoes and bream have been labeled as flagship products for export, he said. Taiwan's agricultural trade hit US$6.217 billion
in the first half of the
year. Inbound shipments outstripped outbound shipments US$4.52 billion to US$1.67 billion, leaving the country with a deficit of US$2.82 billion, up by 29 percent over the previous year's level.
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