■IMMIGRATION
Tibetans receive ARCs
Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commissioner Kao Su-po (高思博) yesterday handed temporary Alien Resident Certificates (ARCs) to 109 Tibetans living in exile in Taiwan. The Tibetans had entered the country on forged Nepalese and Indian passports and continued to live illegally in Taiwan after their visas expired. Last month, they staged a sit-in in Taipei’s Liberty Square, asking the government to grant them asylum as refugees. After negotiations with the government in which they received help from human rights and Tibetan support groups in Taiwan, they were granted residency after a decision was made to revise the Immigration Act (入出國及移民法). The Tibetans were granted temporary residency while the revision of the law is in progress.
■EDUCATION
PRC schools not popular
Taiwanese parents have shown little interest in sending their children to China to receive higher education, the results of a survey released on Thursday by the Ministry of Education (MOE) show. The survey was conducted last month among 4,777 parents of students from 97 senior high schools and senior vocational schools nationwide. The results showed that 77.2 percent of the respondents said they would not consider letting their children study in China. On their reasons, 69.5 listed poor public order in China, while 58.9 percent expressed concern about the problems their children might face adapting to life there. More than 70 percent of the respondents expressed support for the restrictions imposed by the government on Chinese students studying in Taiwan, including limiting the number of Chinese students allowed, not offering favorable treatment to Chinese students and banning the students from accepting employment or entering the civil service in Taiwan after graduation.
■AGRICULTURE
Tobacco plantations wane
Since the liberalization of cigarette imports to Taiwan in 1987, the tobacco plantation area in the country has diminished sharply year by year, with areas used for growing tobacco falling by more than 60 percent over the past five years, government figures show. Data made public recently by the Agriculture and Food Agency Council show total tobacco plantation area in the country dropped from 2,196 hectares in 2004 to 703 hectares in 2007, a 67.98 percent drop, a council official said yesterday. The amount of land used for planting tobacco last year is still being calculated, but the trend is expected to continue.
■POLITICS
Official avoids impeachment
James Chen (陳晉源), former director-general of highways under the Ministry of Transportation and Communication, yesterday survived another impeachment motion after the Control Yuan voted it down. The Control Yuan last month impeached Chen Shen-hsien (陳伸賢), director-general of the Water Resources Agency, over the collapse of Houfeng Bridge (后豐橋) in a typhoon that claimed two lives and left four people missing in September last year. At the time, the Control Yuan incurred criticism for failing to punish any ministry officials responsible for the bridge’s maintenance. The Control Yuan yesterday held a meeting to reconsider the case at the request of the Control Yuan members in charge of the investigation into the incident, but a proposal to impeach James Chen was again voted down. James Chen stepped down one week after the incident.
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