The number of foreigners in Kaohsiung hit a new low last year, the latest statistics from the city's Police Bureau showed yesterday.
A total of 16,629 foreigners with Alien Resident Certificates (ARC) lived in the city at the end of last year, with 12,743 of them female and 3,886 male, the data said.
The number dropped for the fourth year running since the number of ARC holders in the city peaked at 19,630 in 2005, the statistics showed.
They also showed a trend toward decreasing numbers of female expatriates in the city over the past five years, with the number dropping from 15,103 in 2005 to 12,743 last year.
In related news, to try to reverse the city's declining birthrate, Kaohsiung City Government yesterday decided to raise the stipend granted to couples — married or unmarried — for the birth of their third child.
Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) said that starting on Monday next week, couples would receive NT$10,000 — NT$4,000 more than the original stipend — if they had a third baby.
The couples will also be granted a monthly stipend of NT$3,000 until the child reaches the age of one, Chen said, adding that the city government would fully subsidize the child's National Health Insurance fee before his or her first birthday.
The Kaohsiung City Government proposed the incentives because the city has the second-lowest birthrate in the country.
Data from its Social Affairs Bureau showed that about 11,000 babies are born there every year, but only 907 babies born last year were the third child in their families.
Despite the incentives, a mother of two surnamed Huang said she would not consider having another child because she had been on a tight budget for hiring babysitters to take care of her two children.
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:
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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