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.
Left-Handed Girl (左撇子女孩), a film by Taiwanese director Tsou Shih-ching (鄒時擎) and cowritten by Oscar-winning director Sean Baker, won the Gan Foundation Award for Distribution at the Cannes Critics’ Week on Wednesday. The award, which includes a 20,000 euro (US$22,656) prize, is intended to support the French release of a first or second feature film by a new director. According to Critics’ Week, the prize would go to the film’s French distributor, Le Pacte. "A melodrama full of twists and turns, Left-Handed Girl retraces the daily life of a single mother and her two daughters in Taipei, combining the irresistible charm of
A Philippine official has denied allegations of mistreatment of crew members during Philippine authorities’ boarding of a Taiwanese fishing vessel on Monday. Philippine Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) spokesman Nazario Briguera on Friday said that BFAR law enforcement officers “observed the proper boarding protocols” when they boarded the Taiwanese vessel Sheng Yu Feng (昇漁豐號) and towed it to Basco Port in the Philippines. Briguera’s comments came a day after the Taiwanese captain of the Sheng Yu Feng, Chen Tsung-tun (陳宗頓), held a news conference in Pingtung County and accused the Philippine authorities of mistreatment during the boarding of
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is pushing for residents of Kinmen and Lienchiang counties to acquire Chinese ID cards in a bid to “blur national identities,” a source said. The efforts are part of China’s promotion of a “Kinmen-Xiamen twin-city living sphere, including a cross-strait integration pilot zone in China’s Fujian Province,” the source said. “The CCP is already treating residents of these outlying islands as Chinese citizens. It has also intensified its ‘united front’ efforts and infiltration of those islands,” the source said. “There is increasing evidence of espionage in Kinmen, particularly of Taiwanese military personnel being recruited by the
88.2 PERCENT INCREASE: The variants driving the current outbreak are not causing more severe symptoms, but are ‘more contagious’ than previous variants, an expert said Number of COVID-19 cases in the nation is surging, with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) describing the ongoing wave of infections as “rapid and intense,” and projecting that the outbreak would continue through the end of July. A total of 19,097 outpatient and emergency visits related to COVID-19 were reported from May 11 to Saturday last week, an 88.2 percent increase from the previous week’s 10,149 visits, CDC data showed. The nearly 90 percent surge in case numbers also marks the sixth consecutive weekly increase, although the total remains below the 23,778 recorded during the same period last year,
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