An activity to promote interracial marriage love and harmony is set to kick off later this month, the Catholic foundation that will sponsor the activity said yesterday.
Taiwan Good Shepherd Sisters Social Welfare Services (善牧基金會) said at a press conference that the activity -- dubbed "Respect, Harmony, Love -- Pray for Blessing the Families formed by Foreign Wives" -- will take place at the Taipei Cultural Center on April 20.
Similar activities will be held in Taichung and Kaohsiung on April 27 and May 10, respectively.
Sister Tang Chin-lien (
This represents a 22.7-percent increase over the previous year's figure.
Among the foreign brides in this group, those from Vietnam accounted for 62.7 percent of the total.
Tang said that with the number of Taiwan residents marrying people from Southeast Asia increasing, the foundation has also handled an increasing number of foreign spouses soliciting assistance in their family lives.
Sister Tang said that because of culture and language differences, the foundation has encountered complicated legal, cultural and communication problems in trying to provide assistance, adding that it will need strong support from society to carry out its task.
An awareness ad on helping abused foreign spouses in Taiwan was also aired at the press conference, featuring such celebrities as TV actress Chang Hsiao-yen (張曉燕), Taiwan High Speed Rail Corporation chairwoman Nita Ing, dancer Lo Man-fei (
A Philippine spouse called A-Chiu was also present at the press conference. She told reporters how her husband had fled Taiwan after running up huge debts, leaving her and their two children to fend for themselves.
Bursting into tears, she recalled how debtors then came to her door, threatening to force her into prostitution and even to sell her children.
Pointing out that she wanted to go back to her country at the time but did not have money to buy plane tickets, A-Chiu said that she was finally only able to get shelter through the kind help of the Good Shepherd Sisters.
Chen Chu (
The CLA will cooperate with the Good Shepherd Sisters to help more abused women, Chen said.
She added that the council is also considering revising the Employment Service Law (
The sisters said that more than 80 percent of the wives they interviewed had been abused or treated like servants at home.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the