The Taipei City Police Department yesterday apologized for jabbing demonstrators at a Workers’ Day protest with long bamboo poles on Wednesday, and promised to examine its handling of rallies and demonstrations.
The protest, organized by labor unions to coincide with Workers’ Day, attracted about 20,000 people from trade unions and labor rights advocacy groups from across the country.
Some protesters clashed with police in front of the Executive Yuan as they tried pull down barricades and were struck by police.
The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Taipei City council caucus yesterday lashed out at the police department during a council meeting for using violence and demanded that the department apologize to the public.
“Those workers are taxpayers and Taiwanese citizens … As we can see from footage of the protest, the police keep asking protestors to remain calm and act rationally, but the police are the ones that behaved irrationally,” DPP Taipei City Councilor Liu Yao-ren (劉耀仁) said.
At the meeting, footage showed demonstrators using hooks and ropes to tear down barricades set up by police in front of the Executive Yuan. The police reacted by jabbing at anyone who went near the barricades with long bamboo poles.
This continued for about 10 minutes until the protesters stopped trying to dismantle the barricades after several were injured.
Police Department Commissioner Huang Sheng-yong (黃昇勇) said the poles were used to push aside the protesters’ ropes and hooks, rather than hurt the protesters, but promised to examine the handling of rallies and demonstrations.
“I apologize for the use of poles during the protest. We will work to improve our handling of rallies in the future,” he said.
Fang Yang-ning (方仰寧), director of the department’s Zhongzheng First District, said he had asked district police to prepare 35 long bamboo poles before the demonstration after learning that protestors’ planned to tear down barricades and insisted that the poles were not used against protesters.
“The police were careful when using the poles and tried not to hurt protesters. We were just trying to prevent them from tearing down the barricades,” he said.
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