The High Court on Wednesday upheld a guilty verdict against a Keelung man who made two of his children kneel in public with placards bearing humiliating remarks.
The court found the man, surnamed Chang (張), guilty of coercion and sentenced him to 20 days in prison, which is commutable to a NT$20,000 fine.
Chang in November last year made his son and daughter kneel in a busy public garage at the city’s main bus station, holding up pieces of paper saying: “I am a beggar,” the court said.
Chang said he made his children kneel because his daughter, who attends elementary school, received a low grade, and he felt that this son did not provide her with sufficient guidance, it said.
Chang’s actions traumatized his children and exceeded the reasonable limits of parental discipline, the court said.
He had been cited by the local child welfare service as a possible abuser after multiple incidents of corporal punishment and has one deferred prosecution for allegedly beating his daughter to the point of injury in 2017, it said.
Chang and the prosecutor in charge of the investigation had appealed the original verdict by the Keelung District Court, the High Court said.
In other news, a bar in Kaohsiung’s Sinsing District (新興) was ordered to close for five days and fined NT$6,000 after police repeatedly found minors at the establishment.
The Kaohsiung Police Department in April last year found two underage boys and in March found a boy at the establishment during inspections at 4am and 3am respectively, the Kaohsiung District Court said in a summary verdict.
The Kaohsiung District Prosecutors’ Office has pressed charges against the bar in accordance with the Social Order Maintenance Act (社會秩序維護法).
The act stipulates that places of public amusement are responsible for keeping out underage people during late hours.
The bar owner assumed responsibility for last year’s incident, but said that the boy in the incident in March had claimed to be 18 years old before entering the establishment.
However, the owner’s claims were rejected after the boy testified that bar employees did not check his age.
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