People First Party (PFP) legislators yesterday blasted Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-Jeou (
Several PFP lawmakers held a news conference yesterday at which they warned Ma not to intervene in pan-blue rallies and not to be used by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Minister of the Interior Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全). They said the DPP wants to use Ma to create divisions in the pan-blue camp. They advised Ma not to allow himself to be fooled.
"I just wanted to remind Ma that what he did will only make our enemies happy but make his party members sad," PFP caucus whip Hsieh Chang-chieh (
Several female PFP lawmakers said that the police had trampled on them while the crowd was being dispersed and asked Ma to apologize.
When Ma visited female PFP Legislators Shen Chih-hui (
Taipei City Government spokesman Wu Yu-sheng (吳育昇) said the city will deal with Shen and Chin's cases if the news media can provide video footage as evidence of what happened.
However, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Hsu Chung-hsiung (徐中雄) asked the PFP to stop attacking Ma. Hsu said that it was time for the KMT to criticize itself because of its defeat in the presidential election and said the party should stop the street protests.
"Ma didn't do anything wrong in dispersing the crowd. Ma has no need to apologize for what he did because so many people were hurt at the rally," Hsu said.
The police suspect that gangsters were involved in Saturday's pan-blue rally and that gangsters were the ringleaders among those who caused the rally to spiral into violence that caused about 100 injuries, said Wu Su-lu (吳思陸), the Taipei Police Bureau's Chungcheng First Precinct chief.
At a news conference held yesterday at 9:30am -- three hours after the people concentrated on Ketagalan Boulevard had finally been dispersed by the police, Wu reported that 127 people had been injured in the dispersal. Eighty-six were police officers and 41 were members of the general public, of whom 14 were reporters, Wu said.
The police arrested 21 individuals and found that six of them had criminal records. Some of those arrested were in possession of weapons, including slingshots, knives, gas cans and stones.
"It was obvious that gangsters and mobsters en masse were involved in the rally," Wu said.
The police arrested people who assailed the Chiehshou police station (
After Wu issued a command to start a third dispersal action at 12am yesterday, nearly 8,000 riot police moved toward a crowd of about 1,500 people and a violent clash broke out. People hit the police with canes and stones and threw petrol bombs at them. No one was hurt by the petrol bombs.
An elderly, retired veteran tried to kill himself with a fruit knife and was sent to the hospital.
Of the 14 reporters and photographers injured in the riot, several had been beaten by members of the crowd, who accused them of collecting evidence for the DPP.
Two cameramen suffered serious head injuries. Traffic around Ketagalan Boulevard was brought to a standstill.
At about 2am, PFP Chairman James Soong (
KMT Chairman Lien Chan (
At about 6am yesterday morning, nearly 100 people were removed from around Chingfu Gate by the police, and the dispersal of the crowd was complete.
Responding to accusations by PFP lawmakers that he had mismanaged the dispersal of the crowd, Ma said that the police's actions were legal and were based on the Assembly and Parade Law (集會遊行法).
"If the police did nothing about illegal behavior, it would threaten law and order," Ma said early yesterday morning. He said that he accepted all responsibility for the dispersal.
Su praised the city's handling of Saturday's rally, saying it was the best example of cooperation that the local and central government had achieved at any point since the election.
But Su also urged Ma to think twice before approving a rally that the pan-blue camp is planning to hold on May 19.
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: