■ FOREIGN AID
Medics head to Belize
A 10-member Mobile Medical Mission under the International Cooperation and Development Fund of Taiwan (TaiwanICDF) will head to Belize today to provide medical aid in the central American nation lashed by two hurricanes in recent weeks, a TaiwanICDF spokesman said yesterday. According to the spokesman, Belize is in a state of emergency, struggling with the aftermath of Hurricane Dean, which swept across the country at the end of last month, and Hurricane Felix, which struck last Monday. The Taiwanese medical team has prepared more than 20 crates of medicine and medical equipment for its humanitarian mission, the spokesman said.
■ LABOR
Foreign workers rise 4%
The number of foreign workers in the nation totaled 350,100 at the end of June, with nearly half employed as health care or domestic workers, according to statistics released yesterday by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics. The tallies show that the number of foreign workers in Taiwan at the end of June posted a year-on-year increase of 4.1 percent. By profession, some 176,000 foreigners were employed in the manufacturing sector, accounting for 50.2 percent of the total. The figure marked a year-on-year increase of 3 percent. The "social and individual services sectors" employed around 161,000 foreign workers at the end of June, or 45.9 percent of the total, with 158,000 working as health-care assistants and 2,544 as domestic workers. Workers from Indonesia formed the largest group of foreign workers in Taiwan at 103,000, followed by those from Thailand at 90,000 and those from the Philippines at 88,000, the tallied showed.
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