Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) yesterday thanked the organizers of a three-day sit-in front of the Legislative Yuan for keeping the event under control and ensuring that it did not affect the about 2,000 students who were taking competence tests at Taipei Chenggong High School nearby.
“The interests of the students is the Taipei City Government’s priority ... [I] thank the organizers for addressing the students’ concerns and cooperating with us,” Hau said during a visit to the school.
To avoid the students being affected by the protest to demand a referendum on the government’s plan to sign an economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) with China, the test’s organizing committee prepared earplugs for students, while Taipei City’s traffic police division dispatched officers to monitor traffic.
The city government had earlier called on the organizer, which included former premier Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) of the Democratic Progressive Party, to shorten the three-day protest, which started on Thursday, in the interests of the test-takers.
Hsieh accused the city government of trying to use the test as an excuse to interfere with the protest, but promised to adjust the event to respect the rights of the students.
Hau toured the test site for about half an hour yesterday.
He did not visit the site of the protest and declined to make further comments about the rally.
The sit-in organizers canceled a planned march around the legislature and turned off the speakers on stage yesterday morning. They also opened up two lanes on Jinan Road for traffic.
The sit-in, which ended at 10pm yesterday, is widely seen as a precursor to a larger anti-ECFA rally being planned by the DPP that will likely take place in the middle of next month.
The DPP rally is expected to take the place of a number of other protests organized by pro-independence organizations, including one originally announced for June 6.
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