Premier Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國) yesterday said restrictions that have barred foreign students from staying and working in the nation would be further relaxed by the end of this year, as part of the government’s plan to globalize Taiwan’s engineering industry.
The premier attended a conference in Taipei calling for the nation’s engineering industry to go global, saying that while the industry is fairly experienced and infrastructure construction developed, the next step is globalization.
The Public Construction Commission said the government will muster NT$470 million (US$14.38 million) for an investment fund for the engineering industry to make foreign bids in fields in which Taiwan is competitive, such as petrochemicals, power plants, environmental resources including soil and groundwater, electronic toll collection systems and mass rapid transit systems and help them establish five flagship teams aimed at promoting exports.
Foreign bids are to be sought by championing Taiwan’s construction capabilities with a “total-solution” offer of transportation constructions or energy plants, it added.
The streamlining of the flow of human resources, capital and information will also be part of the government’s support for the teams, the commission said.
For capital flow, Mao said he has asked the Ministry of Finance to set up a “syndicated loan platform for system, package plant and construction exports,” using the Export-Import Bank of the Republic of China as a window for uniting the country’s banks to provide syndicated loans.
Regarding the information flow, the premier said the Public Construction Commission, with the assistance of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Economic Affairs, is to establish overseas information-gathering centers to allow Taiwanese firms to snatch future opportunities as soon as possible.
Mao also said that too many restrictions preventing foreign students from staying in the nation, such as the requirement of having work experience of at least two years, which has been scrapped, are “tantamount to chasing them away.”
Restrictions such as wage thresholds and the “point method” are to be removed by the end of this year, Mao said.
“They will be allowed to remain in the nation as long as they can find a job,” Mao said.
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