LAW
Income Tax Act amended
The legislature on Tuesday approved an amendment to the Income Tax Act (所得稅法) to entitle each low-income family to a NT$25,000 (US$830) tax deduction for each child aged between two and five years, effective from 2013. Under the amendment to Article 17 of the act, households with a NT$1.13 million consolidated annual income would qualify for the tax deduction, which was designed to help boost the country’s falling birthrate. The Ministry of Finance said the practice would cost NT$348 million in tax revenue and benefit 300,000 households by an average of NT$1,250. The legislature also approved an amendment to the Educational Fundamental Act (教育基本法) to give teachers more power to discipline students in a bid to end bullying. Also passed was an amendment to the Banking Act (銀行法) to prohibit lenders from setting the prerequisite that borrowers have to provide information on joint guarantees to take out loans.
CROSS-STRAIT TIES
Chinese fishermen rescued
Five Chinese fishermen have been rescued from waters off Penghu after their boat overturned in rough seas late on Tuesday, the National Rescue Command Center said yesterday. The men were sent to a hospital in Chiayi City. None of them sustained life--threatening injuries. An air force helicopter airlifted the fishermen after receiving a distress call at 11:26pm on Tuesday. Zhou Mufa (周木發), the skipper of the Minpuyu, told rescue personnel that he had borrowed the ship from a friend. Zhou said water was entering a ballast tank at the front of the ship and he immediately raised the alarm. The crew managed to get on a lifeboat before the ship sank in waters about 40 nautical miles (74.1km) west of Makung (馬公), the capital of Penghu County.
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