A gay and lesbian group yesterday hailed what it said was the biggest ever gay pride parade in Asia over the weekend, saying 30,000 people had taken to the streets for the event.
“The rally was a big success as the turnout was bigger than we had expected,” spokesman for Taiwan LGBT Pride Rex Shau (邵祺邁)
said.
The tens of thousands who marched through Taipei on Saturday, included supporters from China, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, organizers said.
Waving rainbow flags and placards, the marchers paraded for about 1km, many wearing Brazilian carnival-style costumes, while others wore only men’s briefs despite chilly winds and drizzle.
Organizers said they hoped to move gay and lesbian issues higher up Taiwan’s political agenda ahead of the special municipal elections in five cities that are slated to take place on Nov. 27.
“While we hoped the rally would raise awareness of gays and lesbians, the rally also aimed to vie for substantial support from the election candidates,” Shau said. “Some politicians just paid lip service, never taking real steps to adopt non-discrimination measures.”
The Executive Yuan in 2003 drafted a bill to legalize same-sex marriages and recognize the rights of homosexual couples to adopt children, which would make it the first country in Asia to do so. However, the law has yet to be passed and some gay groups have criticized its drafting as simply a ploy to woo voters.
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