Taoyuan County and Kaohsiung City are among the friendliest areas toward the physically challenged in terms of public infrastructure and facilities, a study by the Construction and Planning Agency shows.
Last summer, the agency launched a project aimed at creating an obstacle-free environment for physically disabled people nationwide. As part of the project, it formed a task force of experts and members of several civic organizations, including the Eden Social Welfare Association, the Republic of China League of Welfare Associations for the Disabled, the National Association of Architects and the Ministry of the Interior's Architecture and Building Research Institute.
The task force then dispatched personnel to each of the country's 25 cities and counties to conduct the survey between Aug. 20 and Sept. 7 last year.
Agency officials said that because of differences in terms of scale of resources and stage of development, for the study the regions of the country were divided into three categories -- urban areas, townships and villages, and remote areas and outlying islands.
For metropolises, Taoyuan County, Kaohsiung City and Taipei City came out the top three places respectively as the most friendly toward the physically challenged.
In the townships and villages category, Kaohsiung County, Taichung County and Ilan County were ranked the top three friendliest, while in the remote areas and outlying islands category, Lianchang County was the friendliest, followed by Kinmen and Penghu County.
Two areas were found to have less-than-adequate public facilities for the physically challenged: Yunlin County, which scored 47.33 out of a possible 100, and Hsinchu County, which scored 58.17.
Agency officials said that the study will be sent to the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics for reference and will be used in adjusting fund allocations to government programs aimed at creating an obstacle-free environment for the nation's physically challenged people.
Taipei on Thursday held urban resilience air raid drills, with residents in one of the exercises’ three “key verification zones” reporting little to no difference compared with previous years, despite government pledges of stricter enforcement. Formerly known as the Wanan exercise, the air raid drills, which concluded yesterday, are now part of the “Urban Resilience Exercise,” which also incorporates the Minan disaster prevention and rescue exercise. In Taipei, the designated key verification zones — where the government said more stringent measures would be enforced — were Songshan (松山), Zhongshan (中山) and Zhongzheng (中正) districts. Air raid sirens sounded at 1:30pm, signaling the
The number of people who reported a same-sex spouse on their income tax increased 1.5-fold from 2020 to 2023, while the overall proportion of taxpayers reporting a spouse decreased by 4.4 percent from 2014 to 2023, Ministry of Finance data showed yesterday. The number of people reporting a spouse on their income tax trended upward from 2014 to 2019, the Department of Statistics said. However, the number decreased in 2020 and 2021, likely due to a drop in marriages during the COVID-19 pandemic and the income of some households falling below the taxable threshold, it said. The number of spousal tax filings rebounded
A saleswoman, surnamed Chen (陳), earlier this month was handed an 18-month prison term for embezzling more than 2,000 pairs of shoes while working at a department store in Tainan. The Tainan District Court convicted Chen of embezzlement in a ruling on July 7, sentencing her to prison for illegally profiting NT$7.32 million (US$248,929) at the expense of her employer. Chen was also given the opportunity to reach a financial settlement, but she declined. Chen was responsible for the sales counter of Nike shoes at Tainan’s Shinkong Mitsukoshi Zhongshan branch, where she had been employed since October 2019. She had previously worked
Labor rights groups yesterday called on the Ministry of Labor to protect migrant workers in Taiwan’s fishing industry, days after CNN reported alleged far-ranging abuses in the sector, including deaths and forced work. The ministry must enforce domestic labor protection laws on Taiwan-owned deep-sea fishing vessels, the Coalition for Human Rights for Migrant Fishers told a news conference outside the ministry in Taipei after presenting a petition to officials. CNN on Sunday reported that Taiwanese seafood giant FCF Co, the owners of the US-based Bumble Bee Foods, committed human rights abuses against migrant fishers, citing Indonesian migrant fishers. The alleged abuses included denying
RSS