The savings of a military veteran who passed away four years ago — estimated at about NT$30 million (US$925,269) — have been donated to a charity foundation established 20 years ago to help veterans’ dependents.
Taichung City Veterans Service Office director Yang Chang-cheng (楊長政), acting on behalf of the late Chao Wei-liang (趙維良), made the donation to the Veterans’ Dependents Foundation on Tuesday.
Chao, who was born in China’s Shangdong Province in 1929, came to Taiwan with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) forces in 1949. He was discharged from the army in 1972 and later taught Chinese at a junior-high school in Taichung.
Chao, who did not marry in Taiwan, wrote a will before his death in 2012, donating all of his NT$19.78 million fortune, as well as houses in Taichung and Taoyuan.
Foundation secretary-general Cheng Sheng-chih (鄭生智) said more than 100 veterans have made donations of more than NT$500,000 since its establishment.
More than NT$1 billion has been donated to the foundation so far, which has benefited more than 60,000 veterans’ dependents, Cheng said, adding that Chao’s donation was the largest ever made to the foundation.
Cheng said that such veterans devoted their lives to the nation and they even contributed after their death through donations of their savings.
Chao’s donation comes amid controversy over self-proclaimed citizen reporter Hung Su-chu (洪素珠), who verbally harassed veterans, demanding that they go back to China in several videos that were posted on her Facebook page.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: