HOLIDAYS
Holidays set for 2018
Workers are to receive 115 days off work next year, with six extended public holidays, the longest being the six-day Lunar New Year holiday, the Directorate-General of Personnel Administration said yesterday. The six extended holidays are: Republic of China (ROC) Founding Day (three days), Lunar New Year (six), Children’s Day and Tomb Sweeping Day (five), Dragon Boat Festival (three) and Mid-Autumn Festival (three), while the ROC Founding Day in 2019 will be four days. Officials said that whenever a public holiday falls on a Tuesday or Thursday, the agency will make arrangements to turn it into an extended holiday, with the previous Saturday used as an official work day. For example, Tomb Sweeping Day next year falls on a Thursday, so Friday, April 6, will be included in a five-day public holiday, with the previous Saturday, March 31, a work day.
AGRICULTURE
Losses top NT$90 million
As of 5pm yesterday, the nation posted NT$90.58 million (US$3.01 million) in agricultural losses over the past few days as a result of torrential rains brought by a slow-moving weather front, the Council of Agriculture said. Agricultural product losses amounted to NT$67.26 million, it added. Yunlin County was the hardest hit municipality, with agricultural losses of NT$25.91 million, or 29 percent of the total, followed by New Taipei City with NT$17.8 million, Koahsiung with NT$10.02 million and Nantou with NT$9.58 million, the council said. Across the nation, 3,472 hectares of crops were damaged; 1,480 hectares of which were rice fields that accounted for NT$14.01 million in losses, while watermelon, corn, peanut and tomato cultivation was also hard hit, the council said. Poultry and livestock losses amounted to NT$8.49 million, while fishery losses totaled NT$1.76 million, the council said, adding that other losses were estimated at NT$13.06 million and included flooding or erosion of farm lands and damage to farm equipment.
CRIME
Red light trips up suspect
A 63-year-old man wanted on fraud charges for 24 years was caught yesterday after running a red light in Kaohsiung’s Lingya District (苓雅), police said. The man, surnamed Chang (張), told police he missed the red light because he could not see the traffic lights clearly. Chang initially gave the police a fake ID number, but the officers became suspicious when the picture did not match the number. Asked again for his ID, Chang pretended to faint, but banged his head on the car floor and started bleeding. Police rushed him to a nearby hospital, where on further questioning he revealed his real identity. He had been wanted since 1993 on suspicion of forging securities, and the statute of limitations on the charges would have run out next year, police said.
CRIME
Drug suspect arrested
A Taiwanese man was arrested on Saturday in Manila on suspicion of drug trafficking, a spokesman for the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) said on Sunday. PDEA agents and police posing as drug buyers arrested the man, 56, at a Manila hotel, an agency spokesman said. Agents found 50kg of crystals in a container used to store dried fish in his car. If the crystals are identified as amphetamines, their street value would be about 250 million Philippine pesos (US$5.17 million), the spokesman said. If tried and found guilty, the suspect could be sentenced to life in prison.
SOCIETY
Divorce rate rises
There were 53,850 divorces in the nation last year, among which marriages that had lasted less than five years accounted for the majority, statistics released by the Ministry of the Interior showed. The divorce rate last year exceeded that of the previous year by 402, the statistics showed, with an average of 147.5 couples getting divorced per day last year. The numbers indicate a trend toward high divorce rates among couples who have been married for less than five years. Short marriages accounted for 33.6 percent of the total divorces last year, the ministry said. Coming in second were couples who had been married for five to nine years, making up 20.7 percent of the total divorces. Data compiled over the past decade showed that the divorce rate fluctuated between 2007 and last year, the ministry said. The average annual divorce number for 2007 to 2012 was roughly 57,000, with the figure dropping to about 53,000 from 2013 to last year.
SOCIETY
Fourteen share lottery
Fourteen people won the NT$10 million (US$332,336) special prize, while 13 won the NT$2 million grand prize in the March-April uniform invoice lottery, the Ministry of Finance said on Friday last week. Winners can claim their prizes from June 6 to Sept. 5, the ministry said. Among the 14 invoices that won the special prize, two were issued by 7-Eleven convenience stores for purchases of NT$65. The stores are in Taipei’s Zhongshan (中山) and Zhongzheng (中正) districts. Another convenience store, FamilyMart, also issued two special prize-winning invoices. The buyers spent NT$60 and NT$78 to buy instant noodles and cigarettes at stores in New Taipei City’s Sanchong District (三重) and Taichung respectively.
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