Charity groups yesterday urged the public to make donations before the New Year and Lunar New Year holiday to help make up for a drop in donations this year and ensure that disadvantaged peope also can share in the holiday spirit.
RED ENVELOPES
“Receiving red envelopes over the Lunar New Year is a blessing for most children, but many disadvantaged children do not have that experience very often,” said Abby Chen (陳雅惠), director of the Office of Resource Development at Child Welfare League Foundation.
She said her foundation is raising funds to distribute 2,500 red envelopes containing NT$500 each and 1,000 New Year’s meals to the underprivileged children and families that it supports.
ECONOMY
She said the sluggish economy this year seemed to dampen people’s enthusiasm to donate money to charity.
In the past, companies or malls would donate Christmas gifts to the foundation, but this year only one company donated 250 gifts, so most of the children will not receive anything, Chen said.
“It has really been a cold winter for us this year,” said Yu Shu-chen (游淑貞), social resources division director at the Taiwan Fund for Children and Families, referring to the group’s limited funds because of a 20 percent drop in donations during the first 11 months of the year.
GOALS
Yu said her charity’s goal is to give each of the 23,000 families it supports “at least one new thing” before the Lunar New Year holiday.
Items needed range from desk lamps and blankets to kitchen utensils, she 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:
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
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
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