Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday vowed to create a care system for the elderly and for children, to relieve the burden on women, who are often the primary caregivers in the family.
“Caregiving for elders and children has been an important issue in society for a long time,” Tsai said at a documentary screening event hosted by the Peng Wan-ru Foundation, named after the slain director of the DPP Department of Women’s Development.
“According to a DPP opinion poll, long-term care for elders and children is one of the top-three issues that people would like the government to address,” she said.
She went on to say that it is an especially urgent issue for women, since the burden of caregiving is often shouldered by female members in the family, “and many of them have to quit their jobs for it.”
It is an ineffective allocation of human resources, she said, as most women are good workers.
“It is therefore the responsibility of the government to support caregiving in the family, ease the burden for the people, help to improve women’s participation in the labor market and to increase family incomes,” Tsai said, adding that she would begin discussing care policies with experts and would start experimenting with policy proposals in cities or counties governed by the DPP.
Asked about the harsh criticism from by long-time Taiwan independence leader Koo Kwang-ming (辜寬敏) about her policy declaration to maintain the cross-strait “status quo,” which compared her to President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), Tsai said she would find a chance to discuss it with Koo in person.
“What he [Koo] said was a little abstract. I will find a chance to speak to him about it,” Tsai said.
In a separate setting, Tsai met with a delegation of Japanese parliamentarians headed by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s brother, Kishi Nobuo.
Tsai said that the two sides promised to enhance exchanges, while the Japanese delegation expressed their concerns over Taiwan’s strict regulations on foods imported from Japan.
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