A group of 30 civil servants to be promoted to the 10th-grade rank in civil service paid for their own travel expenses for a 10-day training program in Australia that began yesterday, with the government only subsidizing NT$30,000 (US$1,000) per person for training fees, the National Academy of Civil Service said yesterday.
The Examination Yuan-affiliated academy made the remark amid public anger over the squandering of taxpayers’ money by government agencies on things such as extravagant and unnecessary overseas field studies, despite the nation’s difficult fiscal situation.
The government allocated NT$1.4 million in its budget for the training program this year, which sent three academy personnel and 30 civil servants to Australia to complete a training course, the academy said.
“Each public servant was required to pay more than NT$60,000 to cover plane tickets, food and accommodation during their training. The government only subsidized the NT$30,000 training fees,” the academy said, adding that all public employees taking part in overseas training programs had to pay for their travel expenses since the programs were initiated in 2009.
The training seminars were first held in Singapore in 2009 and 2010, before moving to South Korea last year and to the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) this year.
The Australia-based educational institution was formed in 2002 by a consortium of governments, universities and business schools from Australia and New Zealand, and is dedicated to delivering better civil service by providing training in strategic management and efficient policymaking to high-ranking government officials.
Meanwhile, the academy signed a memorandum of understanding yesterday with ANZSOG deputy dean Peter Allen and Adam Graycar, director of the Australian National University’s Research School of Social Sciences, during the opening ceremony of the training program in Canberra.
The memorandum aims to facilitate mutual visits by Taiwanese and Australian government officials and promote exchanges through jointly held academic seminars.
Since its establishment in 1999, the academy has inked six other similar memoranda of understanding with domestic and foreign training institutions, including Taiwan’s National Open University and the Polish National School of Public Administration.
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