The nation’s divorce rate has been declining steadily over the past decade and contrary to a traditional belief that couples divorce because of the “seven-year itch,” married couples are most prone to divorce in the sixth year of marriage, the Ministry of the Interior said.
A total of 58,037 married couples split up last year, lower than the average annual number of 63,230 couples recorded between 2002 and 2006, the ministry said in a press statement.
The average annual divorce rate from 2007 to last year was even lower, at 57,443, marking a roughly 10 percent fall from the 2002 to 2006 period, the statement said.
The number of couples who split in the first half of this year also dropped 1.8 percent from the same period last year, ministry officials said.
Official statistics show that the divorce rate peaked at 64,995 in 2003, when an average of 179 married couples parted ways each day. The number has since declined, with about 159 couples divorcing per day last year.
Among the couples who divorced last year, 31 percent had been married for five to nine years; 27.7 percent had been married fewer than five years; while the divorce rate for couples married for more than nine years declined in conjunction with the number of years they were married, the ministry’s statistics showed.
In 2003, 40 percent of couples divorced in their first year of marriage, but this ratio has also seen a steady decline, ministry officials said, adding that last year, two other groups — those with one full year of marriage and those married for six full years — had registered the highest divorce rate at 30 percent each.
Wang Yun-tung (王雲東), a National Taiwan University sociology professor, wrote in a recent article that high divorce rates can be related to better education and more job opportunities for women, as well a rising trend toward individualism.
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