In its latest effort to boost the nation’s fertility rate, the Executive Yuan yesterday approved two draft amendments that would make it easier for military officers to apply for parental leave, including halving the minimum length of service required to receive such leave.
Article 9-1 of the Act of Assignment for Officers and Non-commissioned Officers of the Armed Forces (陸海空軍軍官士官任職條) stipulates that officers can apply for leave without pay to care for children under the age of three if they have been in service for at least a year.
If passed by legislators, the draft amendment would cut the minimum length of service to six months, allowing more officers to stay home to take care of their children.
Officers who have adopted a child under the age of three would also be eligible for parental leave, the amendment says.
A draft amendment to the Act of Merit for Officers and Non-commissioned Officers of the Armed Forces (陸海空軍軍官士官考績條例) to protect the rights of officers applying for parental leave was also approved.
It is designed to revise Article 2 of the act, which states that a performance evaluation would only be conducted if an officer has served for more than six months consecutively in a given year.
The amendment would remove the “consecutive” requirement, giving greater flexibility to officers applying for leave to take care of their children or to accompany their spouses on overseas missions.
According to the Ministry of National Defense’s preliminary estimation, the two proposals would benefit between 800 and 1,000 officers per year, Department of Resource Planning Director-General Pai Chieh-lung (白捷隆) said.
The proposed amendments are part of the government’s efforts to encourage people to have more children, Deputy Minister of National Defense Shen Yi-ming (沈一鳴) said, adding that taking parental leave would not affect an officer’s job evaluation.
The US-based World Population Review’s latest Fertility Rate by Country report showed Taiwan ranking last among 200 countries, with a total fertility rate of 1.218 children per woman.
Japan and South Korea occupied the 179th and 194th spots with a total fertility rate of 1.478 and 1.323 children per woman respectively.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: