A US pastor who founded the Agape House Christian Counseling Center in Hualien County has been posthumously awarded a presidential citation in recognition of his decades-long efforts to help drug addicts.
Frank Bartolatto is one of 12 foreigners, but the first Christian pastor, to receive the honor. Most previous recipients have been from the nation’s military.
Bartolatto died on Nov. 24 last year at the age of 65.
A Ministry of Foreign Affairs official delivered the citation on behalf of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to the late pastor’s widow, Annie Bartolato, at a ceremony on Monday.
She expressed gratitude for the honor and said she would continue the center’s efforts to help addicts.
The couple set up Agape House in Sindian (新店) in the then-Taipei County in 1984, to offer counseling and rehabilitation programs to help people recover from drug and alcohol addiction. They later moved the facility to Hualien.
The Bartolattos were both addicted to drugs when they were young. After they realized the negative effects of narcotics abuse — including Annie’s inability to get pregnant — they decided to quit.
Since then, the pair shared their experiences to try and help addicts to recover through a series of activities, such as personal and group counseling, or Christian education.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS