EMPLOYMENT
Social sciences gain favor
Local businesses favor graduates from National Taiwan University (NTU), a survey said yesterday. The nation’s top-ranked university beat out long-time favorite National Cheng Kung University, which ranked second in a survey by online job broker 1111 Job Bank. National Chengchi University, National Chiao Tung University and National Tsing Hua University rounded out the top five, according to the 3,396 employers who responded to the survey conducted from Nov. 2 to Nov. 30 last year. Fu Jen Catholic University and Tamkang University were the first and second choices for private universities, the poll showed. 1111 Job Bank vice president Daniel Lee (李大華) said schools that have strong social science backgrounds won greater recognition in the survey than those with an emphasis on natural sciences.
RETAIL
7-Eleven hikes tea egg price
President Chain Store Corp, operator of 7-Eleven, has increased the price of its tea eggs, an item unique to Taiwanese convenience stores. 7-Eleven, the largest convenience store chain in Taiwan, with more than 5,000 stores, on Wednesday increased the price of tea eggs from NT$8 to NT$10 each. 7-Eleven said the decision was made based on egg price increases of 25 percent in the past five years. Council of Agriculture statistics showed that last month, the farm price of eggs was NT$56.1 per kilogram, up 5.6 percent from a year earlier. Family Mart, the second-largest of the four major convenience store chains in Taiwan, was the first to raise the price of tea eggs to NT$10 at its nearly 3,000 stores in October last year. OK Mart, the smallest of the four chains, followed suit in November last year, while Hi-Life, which has about 1,300 stores, said it had no immediate plans to increase the price of its tea eggs.
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