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.
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
US President Donald Trump said "it’s up to" Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be "very unhappy" with a change in the "status quo," the New York Times said in an interview published yesterday. Xi "considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing," Trump told the newspaper on Wednesday. "But I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that," he added. "I hope he doesn’t do that." Trump made the comments in
Tourism in Kenting fell to a historic low for the second consecutive year last year, impacting hotels and other local businesses that rely on a steady stream of domestic tourists, the latest data showed. A total of 2.139 million tourists visited Kenting last year, down slightly from 2.14 million in 2024, the data showed. The number of tourists who visited the national park on the Hengchun Peninsula peaked in 2015 at 8.37 million people. That number has been below 2.2 million for two years, although there was a spike in October last year due to multiple long weekends. The occupancy rate for hotels
RSS