Sports Affairs Council Minister Tai Hsia-ling (戴遐齡) yesterday said a decision by the World Taekwondo Federation (WTF) last week to suspend taekwondo athlete Yang Shu-chun (楊淑君) over a footwear controversy constituted bullying.
“Yang was bullied,” Tai told a meeting at the legislature’s Education and Culture Committee.
Asked by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chen Shu-hui (陳淑慧) to assess the situation, Tai said she “absolutely agreed” the nation was bullied by the WTF and the Asian Taekwondo Union (ATU) over the controversy.
Tai made the remark in response to the WTF’s decision on Tuesday last week to ban Yang from participating in -competitions for three months and to suspend Yang’s coach, Liu Tsung-ta (劉聰達), for one year and eight months.
The Chinese Taipei Taekwondo Association was fined US$50,000 because Yang and Liu protested the decision ringside at the Asian Games in Guangzhou, China, on Nov. 17.
Yang was disqualified for allegedly breaking the rules by wearing extra electronic sensors in her socks to register more points.
She was leading her opponent 9-0 when she was disqualified and a dumbfounded Yang refused to leave the arena for an extended period of time despite requests by officials for her to do so.
Video replays of the match showed Yang had removed the two sensors before the fight. -Inconsistent explanations by taekwondo officials about Yang’s disqualification raised questions about the legitimacy of the dismissal and sparked anger among Taiwanese against the WTF, ATU and even South Koreans.
Tai said that although the government would not give up appealing the decision on Yang’s behalf at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland, the nation did not have the authority to either accept or reject the suspension ruling.
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
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
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