SOCIETY
‘Blue-collar’ APRC coming
The Ministry of Labor plans to allow certain migrant workers in Taiwan to apply for permanent residence, Minister of Labor Chen Hsiung-wen (陳雄文) said on Wednesday. Foreign unskilled employees who have been working in Taiwan for a certain period of time and possess certain qualifications would be eligible to apply, Chen said. Chen said a new type of permanent residence is to be designed for that category of workers. It would differ from the Alien Permanent Resident Certificate (APRC) that is granted to foreign professionals, Chen said, adding that the ministry aims to implement it by the end of next year. Chen said the ministry hopes that the new rules help ease the shortage of manual laborers. Unlike white-collar workers, who become eligible for APRCs after five years in Taiwan, blue-collar workers have no such paths to permanent residence.
TRADE
Vietnam fails to aid firms
Taiwanese businesses in Vietnam have not received reasonable compensation nearly one year after a deadly anti-Chinese riot in the Southeast Asian country, Taiwan’s representative to Vietnam Huang Chih-peng (黃志鵬) said on Wednesday. Huang said many Taiwanese businesses have not been fully compensated. In protest against the Vietnamese government’s lukewarm reaction to the riot, which left three Chinese dead and about 400 Taiwanese companies affected, Huang said the office does not encourage Taiwanese to invest in the country. Liu Mei-te (劉美德), chairwoman of the Taiwanese Chamber Of Commerce in Vietnam, said Taiwanese businesses are very dissatisfied about the way the Vietnamese government handled the aftermath of the riot. The riots erupted on May 13 last year.
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