Mere days after allegations of delaying tsunami payouts clouded the Government Information Office (GIO), the Taipei City Government yesterday came under fire for the same matter. The Taipei City Social Welfare Department denied leaving tsunami donations undistributed and said that the money will be used to improve education in Aceh, Indonesia.
"As a local government, we were in a position to support the central government's fundraising campaign," the director of the department, Hsueh Cheng-tai (薛承泰), said yesterday.
"Since we did not hold any fundraising events and received little in lieu of donations, our strategy is to use the money for reconstruction work, such as providing children with educational resources," he said.
Hsueh's remarks came after Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taipei City Councilor Lee Wen-yin (李文英) accused the city government of failing to distribute a total of NT$37 million in donations remitted to the department's account.
Dismissing the accusations, Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
"We sent a medical team to the area immediately after the tsunami and the local people said that they had already received a lot of international donations. So we figured we should use our donations for future reconstruction work," he said.
Records published by the department later yesterday showed that donations from civil groups, individuals and city government staff amounted to just over NT$1 million in the first month after the disaster. The total reached NT$37 million last month.
Hsueh said that unlike the total raised during the GIO's fundraising campaign, which reached NT$395 million within a short time, donations sent to the city government came in slowly over several months.
Ma okayed the department's proposal to have the city's disaster-donation management committee review the distribution plans in June. As some civil groups presented proposals -- including establishing digital classrooms for children in Aceh, Indonesia, and assisting students in Sumatra to continue their education in Taiwan -- the committee will hold a meeting to discuss these next month, according to the department.
Lee dismissed these arguments and said that it was the city government's laziness and inefficiency that led to the delay in payouts.
"The donation management committee was established in 2002. The city government gave the committee the right to process the disaster donations promptly. It's ridiculous that the committee hasn't held one single meeting so far to discuss ways to distribute the money," she said.
Hsueh said that the money was meant for future reconstruction efforts in the disaster-stricken area, instead of immediate help. He promised that the management committee would look into the proposals carefully to ensure that every dollar was spent wisely and encouraged civil groups to present more proposals to the city government before the meeting.
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