Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) yesterday handed out food vouchers to two low-income families.
Hau said he would like to see vouchers distributed to 10,000 families, preferably delivered in person by city officials. He said he hoped at least 636 families would receive vouchers by tomorrow.
Applicants must pass a screening process for the vouchers, he said.
Accompanied by borough wardens and Taipei City Department of Civil Affairs Commissioner Huang Lu Ching-ru (黃呂錦茹), Hau gave 50 vouchers with a face value of NT$100 to two families in Datong District (大同).
He then accompanied one of the families to FamilyMart to buy food.
The vouchers can only be used at FamilyMart stores and cannot be spent on cigarettes or alcohol.
When asked by reporters what she thought of the vouchers, a woman in the family who asked to be identified as Miss Luo said the vouchers were important for families like hers but “are not enough,” adding that she needed a job.
Luo said she was disappointed when she found out that she could not use the vouchers to buy a bowl of noodle soup.
Hau said the vouchers could only be spent at FamilyMart because the city had teamed up with the chain to offer reduced prices for shoppers paying with the coupons.
Luo said her mother could not work, while she herself earned very little washing dishes.
Luo said her mother had been a street cleaner for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, but had stopped working two years ago after a botched operation on her spine.
Although her mother received NT$3,000 per month from the city because of her physical disability, she did not qualify for subsidies for low-income families.
Huang Lu said that as of yesterday, a total of 1,437 families had applied for the food vouchers. Hau said all applicants who qualified would receive the vouchers.
Thirty-one city department officials and borough wardens will distribute the vouchers in designated areas, she said.
The Taipei City Government’s food vouchers follow on the heels of a similar program in Kaohsiung in January.
The Kaohsiung City Government launched a monthly NT$1,500 food voucher program for 300 low-income families.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods