CRIME
Police stop attacker
Police yesterday fired 13 shots at a man who stormed into Tainan’s Jhaigang Police Station with two kitchen knives to stop him from attacking police officers at the station. Five shots hit the man’s legs and one hit his abdomen, and he was rushed to a nearby hospital, police said, adding that he was not in a life-threatening situation. It was not immediately clear if any police officers were injured in the incident.
EMPLOYMENT
Ministry to raise labor cap
The Ministry of Labor is to ease the maximum limit for foreign workers in the farming sector from 2,400 to 6,000 to alleviate a labor shortage, an official said on Thursday. At the request of the Council of Agriculture (COA), the quota for the employment of migrant workers in the agricultural sector was recently reviewed by the ministry’s Cross-Border Workforce Affairs Center, which suggested an increase, said Paul Su (蘇裕國), who heads the center. While the cap will be raised, regulations governing types of employment will remain, Su said. It means that migrant farm workers can be employed in areas including animal husbandry and fish farming, but they will be barred from jobs such as milking cows and tending orchids, edible mushrooms and vegetables, he said. The center also recommended that the COA ensure that migrant farm workers do not abandon their jobs, given a higher incidence of farm workers absconding.
EDUCATION
7,000 foreign students arrive
Almost 7,000 international students have arrived in the nation since February under a program to help them pursue their education here amid border controls implemented in the wake of COVID-19 outbreaks. According to the Ministry of Education, a total of 6,916 university or lower-level international students have been granted visas since July 19, of which 2,995 were in Taiwan as of Wednesday. Meanwhile, of the 5,790 international students enrolled in local non-degree programs, 3,913 had arrived between Feb. 13 and Wednesday, the data showed. The numbers are bound to increase as more students are set to arrive in the run-up to the start of the semester. Under Taiwan’s quarantine rules, they will have to go into isolation in the first three days following their arrival in Taiwan and self-monitor their health for another four days, after which they will be allowed access to their school. To save employees at institutions in southern Taiwan from having to make the trip to Taipei, the ministry plans to meet with schools in the south to discuss the possibility of using Kaohsiung International Airport to assist international students with their entry, it said.
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:
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
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