SOCIETY
Changhua extends subsidies
The Changhua County government has decided to extend its child birth subsidies for another year as the policy has proved effective in boosting the birth rate in the county. Married -Changhua residents and single women over the age of 20 are eligible to apply for the subsidy provided one of the baby’s parents has household registration in the county and has lived there for more than a year. The newborn must be registered in -Changhua as well. The subsidy is NT$10,000 per newborn. The number of newborns in the county increased by 99 year-on-year after the government extended the subsidies from low-income families to all residents last year, statistics showed. In 2008, the number of babies born in the county was 12,146.
EDUCATION
Departments face mergers
Academic department mergers at tertiary institutions will be unavoidable as the number of high school graduates continues to decline because of the steadily falling birth rate, an educator said yesterday. The merger trend is likely to escalate in about four to six years time, said Victor Liu (劉維琪), chairman of the non-profit Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan. “Department mergers are expected to peak between 2015 and 2017 when children who were born in 1998 will be entering college,” Liu said. The number of babies born in 1998 was 60,000 fewer than the previous year, Liu said. However, commercialization and globalization could help tertiary institutions to survive, he said. For example, further opening to international and Chinese students could help academic departments to remain operational, he said.
LANGUAGE
Ma supports tradition
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said over the weekend he hopes the country will take the lead in the promotion of Chinese culture and the use of traditional Chinese characters amid a worldwide trend of learning Mandarin. Ma said he is committed to the preservation of traditional Chinese characters and expects the country to play a leading role in this regard. “I have always wanted to make school campuses more international and make Taiwan a global educational center in East Asia,” he said at an Annual Conference of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language in Taipei. Traditional Chinese characters are the essence of the culture and should be preserved and passed down to future generations, he said. However, at present, only 40 million people worldwide use traditional characters, while 1.3 billion use simplified Chinese, Ma said.
TOURISM
Alishan line reopens
The only operational forest railway in the country celebrated its 99th anniversary yesterday with the resumption of service on a segment of line that was damaged during a typhoon last year. The Chiayi Forestry Area Administration hosted a party to mark the 99th anniversary of the Alishan Forest Railway, which began service on Dec. 25, 1912. Railway enthusiasts and visitors flocked to Beimen Station, one of the stations along the main line of the unique -narrow-gauge railway, in Chiayi City. Service on the section between Beimen (北門) and Jhuci Township (竹崎) in Chiayi County has resumed, while the Zhushan Sunrise-Watching Line (祝山觀日線) and the Divine Tree Line (神木線) in the Alishan area have re-opened, Council of Agriculture Deputy Minister Hu Sing-hwa (胡興華) said. The 71.4km railway and three of its branch lines were badly damaged by Typhoon Morakot in August last year.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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