Kaohsiung Public Library is this year to expand its library on wheels initiative for Southeast Asian migrant workers by making stops at more locations across the city, officials announced on Thursday.
Since November last year, the “Mobile Library: Reading Southeast Asia” program has on a monthly basis delivered books to female migrant workers living at Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc’s dormitories in the city’s Nanzih District (楠梓), the officials said.
The mobile library is to add the migrant workers’ residential complex and Laborers’ Park (勞工公園) in Cianjhen District (前鎮) to its itinerary, they said.
Photo: Huang Chia-lin, Taipei Times
The collection of 1,400 titles in Southeast Asian languages is to be increased by 400 books, mostly works in English and Filipino to accommodate a growing population of Philippine workers, they added.
The residential complex has an estimated population of 1,000 Philippine migrant workers, 100 Vietnamese and some Thai workers, the officials said.
Services at that location are to be available near dormitory units one to four on Kuojian Road, they said.
The Laborers’ Park stop would make it easier for migrant workers in the nursing or elderly care sectors to borrow books, the officials said.
Services are to be available at the entrance of the Laborers’ Recreation Center near the park from 3pm to 5pm on the last Wednesday of each month, they said.
The library on wheels program is to have translators hired from the city’s new immigrants, as well as sing-along and storytelling services for older people who migrant workers are caring for, when appropriate, they added.
The municipal library thanked the National Immigration Agency’s local office and the Kaohsiung Labor Affairs Bureau for their assistance in furnishing the venues and other support for the program.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
RSS