In the second such incident reported in one week, a member of the pro-unification Patriot Association (愛國同心會) allegedly berated Japanese students and their tour guide outside Taipei 101 on Thursday, insulting them in both Chinese and Japanese.
A Taiwanese tour guide working with a group of Japanese tourists subsequently dialled 110 to summon emergency services after the high-school-aged tourists were verbally attacked by a member of the Patriot Association who is said to be a regular outside the building handing out brochures.
The tourists were making their way to Taipei 101 at about 1pm when the incident occurred.
According to a tour guide surnamed Fan (范), when the group arrived at the building, he and three Japanese teachers encountered the man associated with the Patriot Association.
Fan said he explained that the group was from Japan and politely refused the pamphlets, after which the man in his 60s allegedly began calling Fan a “Japanese running dog” and the teachers “Japanese devils.”
Fan said he then immediately led the group away, wanting to avoid any trouble.
At about 4pm, Fan said he returned to the square to meet with another group of Japanese tourists at which time the same man allegedly began swearing at tour group members in Japanese.
Not willing to be humiliated, some of the students attempted to defend themselves, but were urged onto the waiting bus, Fan said.
Another tour guide, surnamed Lin (林), said he called the police and filed a report.
The police said a similar incident had occurred a week earlier involving another group of Japanese tourists, Lin said.
Commenting on the case, Democratic Progressive Party Taipei City Councilor Yen sheng-kuan (顏聖冠) strongly criticized the actions of association members as greatly harmful to Taipei, adding that police should have given a more active response.
Taipei City Government spokesman Sidney Lin (林鶴明) said the city would attempt to speak with the association to better understand its members’ actions.
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