Although President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) on many occasions touted the nation’s robust economic recovery last year, the number of homeless people asking for help has increased by almost 30 percent to 720,000, according to the founder of three social groups dedicated to helping the nation’s disadvantaged people.
According to Tsao Ching (曹慶), a total of 25,000 people attended annual pre-Lunar New Year weilu (圍爐) banquets that his three groups held at several venues throughout the nation on Wednesday for homeless and underprivileged citizens.
The weilu feasts, this year made possible by donations from 6,000 Taiwanese, were jointly organized by the Genesis Social Welfare Foundation, the Zenan Homeless Social Welfare Foundation and the Hua Shan Social Welfare Foundation at 11 of their service centers in Taipei Keelung, Taoyuan and Changhua.
The number of attendees this year set a record for events of this type, which have been held for the past 21 years, Tsao said.
The number of tables increased by 1,000 from last year to 2,500 this year, he said.
Tsao said he would prefer to see the scale of the weilu feasts for the homeless, which usually take place on Lunar New Year’s Eve to celebrate family reunions, shrink rather than grow each year.
“However, the number of tables has increased continually with more and more people seeking to attend the event, which many describe as their most sumptuous meal of the year,” he added.
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:
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