A women’s rights group earlier this week said it hopes that human rights concepts will be included in curriculum guidelines, after the issue of “comfort women” became a point of controversy in the revised high-school curriculum guidelines dispute.
The curriculum fails to provide accurate information on the topic of comfort women — women across Asia who entered into sexual slavery under the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II — to help students understand the sexual abuses and pain suffered by comfort women, Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation executive director Kang Shu-hua (康淑華) said.
The foundation has been working to help Taiwanese comfort women cope with their mental anguish and to seek justice and compensation from Japan over the past 20 years.
“It is meaningless to focus on whether the comfort women were ‘forced’ into sexual slavery or ‘volunteered,’” Kang said, expressing her hope that the curriculum guidelines will include human rights concepts.
Protesters took to the streets and occupied the Ministry of Education forecourt earlier this month to oppose changes to high-school history curriculum guidelines, which, according to activists, “are presented from the perspective of Chinese unification.”
While most of the protesters’ anger is directed toward what they call opaque changes to the curriculum that present a “China-centric” view, a handful of opponents have also questioned a modification related to the comfort women.
The change describes their sexual slavery during World War II as “women forced to become comfort women” instead of simply as “comfort women.”
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