The left-wing People’s Democratic Front (PDF) yesterday launched its campaign for the legislative elections in January next year, with disability rights advocate Lai Tzung-yu (賴宗育) — who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair — spearheading the party’s efforts in Taipei’s Shilin (士林) and Datong (大同) districts.
Lai, president of the New Vitality Independent Living Association, said he entered the race to usher in more political opportunities for disabled people and to promote the establishment of community-based long-term care services.
“The point of politics is to improve people’s lives,” Lai said through interpreters. “However, the conditions we encounter in our lives hinder us from entering politics.”
While Lai would be the PDF’s official candidate in the constituency, he is to be joined by social worker Hsu Ya-ting (許雅婷) and sex workers’ rights activist Kuo Pei-yu (郭姵妤), with the trio representing the PDF through the party’s experimental nomination system.
Stressing a strong emphasis on grassroots empowerment, the PDF operates on a collective decisionmaking process, with its candidates selected from public discussion groups centered on various progressive issues — such as disability rights and Aboriginal rights.
The PDF advocates for underprivileged groups to “seize power” from the major parties, with its party platform maintaining that both the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Democratic Progressive Party are “capitalist-friendly” in nature.
The party plans to nominate candidates in Kaohsiung’s Fengshan District (鳳山) and New Taipei City’s Sanchong District (三重), while it is also considering candidates in Keelung, Taoyuan, Chiayi City and Hualien County.
Following the press conference, the group presented a theater performance, which was originally performed in English at the multinational Performing The World conference in New York last year.
Kuo said that the New York trip, which included both disabled and able-bodied members, led her to reflect upon the difficulties that caregivers for disabled people face on a daily basis.
The play addressed discrimination toward physically or mentally disabled people and depicted tensions between disabled people and their family members — who most often shoulder the burden of providing care in the absence of adequate public caregiving services.
In a part of the play that centered on a disabled character based on Lai’s experiences, the character’s sister complained about how it seemed “unfair” that her disabled brother was exempt from performing any household chores.
Lai’s mother and sister, who were both at the PDF campaign’s inaugural news conference in Taipei yesterday, said they were shocked and confused after learning just two days earlier about his decision to run in the election.
Lai’s sister, visibly upset, said that, although she complained about her household responsibilities, their mother could testify that she did not mention any “unfairness” involved.
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
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
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