The head of the Veterans Affairs Commission yesterday said volunteer soldiers who have completed four years of service should be entitled to special treatment after leaving the military, adding that such a policy would encourage young Taiwanese to join the proposed all-volunteer military.
Veterans Affairs Commission Minister Tseng Jing-ling (曾金陵) told a meeting of the legislature’s National Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee that the commission had proposed that volunteer soldiers who have completed 10 years of service should receive treatment now reserved for veterans, while volunteer soldiers who have completed four, six or eight years of service should receive special treatment after they leave the service.
Under the proposal, Tseng said, soldiers who complete four years of service would receive benefits such as subsidies for tertiary education, visits to the doctor and for finding employment, as well as other welfare programs.
However, those perks would not be indefinite, he said.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators said the cost of the policy to the treasury would be unreasonable.
DPP Legislator Tsai Huang-liang (蔡煌瑯) told the meeting that while he did not oppose volunteer soldiers who had served four years receiving some sort of preferential treatment, the policy unveiled by Tseng appeared to be intended to boost President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) re-election campaign.
Furthermore, the policy ran counter to claims by the government that it was finding it difficult to fund the proposed professional military program, Tsai said.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lin Yu-fang (林郁方) said no one would consider being a soldier if their treatment after retirement was poor.
KMT Legislator Herman Shuai (帥化民) said the commission should develop a policy which would assist soldiers who have completed four, six or eight years of service with job training, as well as help them move into new occupations, rather than just provide them with subsides or pensions.
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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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