The government plans to station two retired senior military personnel at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Washington to enhance exchanges, Veterans Affairs Council Minister Feng Shih-kuan (馮世寬) said on Wednesday.
However, the move is dependent upon lawmakers passing draft amendments to the Organization Act of Veterans Affairs Council (國軍退除役官兵輔導委員會組織法) that the Executive Yuan approved on April 30.
Speaking at a meeting of the legislature’s Foreign and National Defense Committee, Feng said that the two council members were originally scheduled to be sent to the US in September, but now due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the move has been delayed, but is likely to take place before the end of the year.
Photo: Tu Chien-jung, Taipei Times
The initiative, estimated to cost NT$15 million (US$500,868) annually, would see the veterans, who are required to be council members, posted to the office’s defense mission, he said.
The two appointees would receive training for their posting, which would focus on building closer ties with their US counterparts and taking care of Taiwanese veterans and their family members living in North America, the council said.
Taiwan has 24 veterans’ affairs organizations in the US and Canada, where an estimated 4,966 Taiwanese live, council data showed.
The pair would also participate in veterans’ affairs activities to improve Taiwan’s visibility on the world stage, especially in terms of the contributions the Republic of China made in World War II, the council said.
One post requires someone who attained the rank of an army or air force colonel or navy captain and served as a military attache or deputy attache overseas.
The council has chosen a retired air force colonel for one of the positions and would ask the Ministry of National Defense to come up with a short list to fill the other post, Feng said.
The project was launched after representatives of American Veterans visited Taiwan last year and called for the establishment of an overseas branch of the council in the US.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS