Taiwan Solidarity Union nominee for legislator-at-large Annie Lee (李安妮) yesterday accused Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) of stealing her women's welfare policy agenda.
"Ma has copied many of my ideas and used them in the white paper on women's welfare that he released on Tuesday," Lee told a news conference at the legislature.
The creating of a governmental gender equality commission and raising women's employment rate, as Ma mentioned in his white paper, "were ideas I proposed in October," she said.
"I would be happy to see Ma follow in my steps, but he has to remember that he is a presidential candidate," Lee said. "How can a presidential candidate copy the policy proposals made by someone who is running for a legislative seat?"
"Ma's white paper [also] didn't make clear how he would put those policies into practice," she said. "Ma is good at winning women's trust with his good looks, but his ideas are superficial."
Ma campaign spokesman Lo Chih-chiang (
Lee, daughter of former president Lee Teng-hui (
"DPP politicians say they are proud of having raised women's participation in politics, but in reality, it has decreased," Annie Lee told the same press conference.
Annie Lee said the percentage of women serving in Cabinet positions had declined.
She said that while 21.4 percent of Cabinet seats were occupied by women in 2000, that number had gradually declined to 12.5 this year.
Annie Lee also criticized the DPP over its promise to boost employment for women.
"The DPP has claimed that on average 100,000 women entered the employment market every year between 2002 and 2005, but government statistics show only an average of 78,000 each year," she said.
"In addition, President Chen Shui-bian (
Numbers provided by Annie Lee showed that the rate of labor participation for women rose from 46 percent in 2000 to 48.6 percent last year.
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:
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