LABOR:
Taichung canceling foreign workers’ contracts
Over the past two months, an average of 20 foreign workers per day have had their work contracts in Taichung County terminated, the county’s Department of Labor Affairs said on Saturday. Since October, a growing number of foreign workers have been let go because of the economic downturn, department director Chang Ta-chun (張大春) said. The department will offer assistance to those workers if necessary, he said. Council of Labor Affairs statistics show that the nation has about 370,000 foreign workers. With the nation’s unemployment rate rising to 5.03 percent in December, some labor groups have called for a reduction in the quote on foreign workers to give more employment opportunities to local workers, council officials recently said.
SCHOOL:
Taiwan scholarship program accepting applications
The Scholarship Program of Taiwan is accepting applications from now until March 31, the Ministry of Education, the National Science Council, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) announced on Sunday. Citizens of selected countries who are interested in obtaining a degree or studying Mandarin in Taiwan are welcome to apply. Interested applicants can inquire local Republic of China embassies or representative offices or go to www.edu.tw/bicer or MOFA’s Web site at www.mofa.gov.tw for further information. E-mail inquiries can be sent to tsp@deps.ntnu.edu.tw. A total of 427 scholarships will be awarded.
POLICE:
Hsinchu police rewarded with Wang Chien-ming baseball
During the Lunar New Year holidays, the Hsinchu office of the National Immigration Agency (NIA) received a baseball signed by New York Yankees pitcher Wang Chien-ming (王建民) as a sign of gratitude for helping an American woman retrieve a lost passport. On Monday last week around 10.30pm, an American woman reported the loss of her mother’s passport to the NIA’s Hsinchu office. The woman said she, her husband and her mother had been out shopping, and that her mother had lost her wallet in a taxi on their way home. Among other important items things, the wallet contained her passport. The mother was frantic because she had to return to South Korea, where she is working as a teacher, on a flight that she had already booked for last Wednesday. Upon receiving the report, the NIA accompanied the woman to the Nanmen police station in Hsinchu to file a missing passport report. The officer in charge asked staff that were off duty to contact taxi companies to look for the lost wallet. Some officers even asked friends to assist in the search. As a result, the wallet was found intact with all its contents by 6am the next day. As a sign of gratitude, the woman’s husband presented the Hsinchu police station with a baseball that had been signed by Wang.
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
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
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