LABOR
Work dates set for 2017
Government workers are to have three fewer days off next year than this year, the Directorate-General of Personnel Administration’s preliminary schedule shows Counting weekends and national holidays, workers will have a total of 116 days off, including a six-day Lunar New Year holiday from Jan. 27 to Feb. 1. There will be four four-day holidays: 228 Memorial Day (Feb. 25 to Feb. 28), Tomb Sweeping Day (April 1 to April 4), the Dragon Boat Festival (May 27 to May 30) and Double Ten National Day (Oct. 7 to Oct. 10). The other long holiday will be a three-day break for the New Year, from Dec. 31 to Jan. 2, 2017. The Mid-Autumn Festival, which will fall on a Wednesday next year, Oct. 4, will just be a single day off.
TRAVEL
Overseas visits hit high
The number of Taiwanese traveling overseas reached a record high of 13.18 million last year, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said, citing statistics from the Tourism Bureau. The annual growth rate in travelers was 11.3 percent, a six-year high, it said. Domestically, major tourist attractions such as recreation areas and national scenic areas and parks had 285 million visits last year — the second-highest level in history, but a slight decline compared with 288 million visits recorded in 2014, the DGBAS said. With economic development and increasing incomes, per capita GDP has exceeded US$20,000 since 2011, and Taiwanese have been engaging in more leisure activities, the agency said. Expenditure on leisure activities in the nation as a whole totaled NT$73.02 billion (US$2.25 billion) in 2014, representing an annual growth of 4.4 percent, and reached NT$74.9 billion last year, for an annual growth of 2.6 percent.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods