The Cabinet yesterday approved a draft bill to ensure that women's rights to breastfeed in public areas are supported by the public and private sectors, bringing the country in line with international practices.
The Department of Health (DOH), in charge of drafting the bill, said the proposal was based on the 1990 Innocenti Declaration produced and adopted by participants at the WHO and the UN Children’s Fund, whose tenets were reaffirmed in an updated version in 2005.
The bill would prohibit anyone or any place from disallowing, hindering, or driving away women breastfeeding babies in public regardless of whether or not it has a breastfeeding room.
A DOH survey showed that about 60 percent of respondents supported breastfeeding in public. Among women who have breastfed, between 80 percent and 90 percent supported a law that would require breastfeeding areas be set up in public areas.
If the legislature approves the bill, individuals or establishments that violate the regulation would be fined between NT$6,000 and NT$30,000.
The bill will require the installation of breastfeeding rooms in the following public places: government buildings with total floor area of more than 500m² where utility-related services are provided; state-owned enterprises with total floor area of more than 500m²; public transport buildings with total floor are of more than 1,000m²; and department stores with total floor area of more than 10,000m², among others.
The Cabinet also approved an amendment to the Tobacco and Alcohol Tax Act (菸酒稅法) banning claims that alcoholic beverages have therapeutic effects.
If the amendment clears the legislature, local alcohol manufacturers that use imported raw materials would also no longer be allowed to put tags stating the place of origin of the materials.
The Ministry of Finance said in a statement that locally produced Scotch whisky made from raw materials imported from Scotland, for example, would not be allowed to use this information on product advertisements when the legislation is passed.
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:
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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