The Teacher Chang Foundation, which is known for its telephone counseling service, said yesterday it has launched a video channel on YouTube and would activate a text-messaging account on the popular mobile phone application Line by the end of the year to reach out more young people in need.
It added that it also plans to expand the number of its workers in New Taipei City and Greater Tainan and that starting April 1, its “1980” service hotline became toll-free for calls from landlines and payphones.
The foundation was created 45 years ago by the China Youth Corps, which was established by then-premier Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) in response to rising problems among the nation’s teenagers and young people.
Photo: Chien Jung-fong, Taipei Times
To celebrate the organization’s 45th anniversary, the foundation yesterday unveiled a statue of Sung Shih-hsuan (宋時選), who was listed first on the rotation list of the telephone counselors when the foundation was set up in 1969.
Besides telephone counselors, the foundation has also experts in psychology, social work and psychiatric treatment. The foundation has 12 counseling centers nationwide.
According to the foundation, it receives more than 250 calls to its counselling service on a normal day.
In addition to young people, the foundation also handles counseling requests from the general public. It has set up a special service line to help people quit smoking.
Special counseling was also made available to people affected by the 921 Earthquake in 1999 and the disasters caused by Typhoon Morakot in 2009.
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