The author of a book on live organ harvesting, Ethan Gutmann, denied that he had alleged that independent Taipei mayoral candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was an “organ broker,” adding that the accusations were likely caused by a misunderstanding.
“We take Dr Ko’s concerns very seriously and we have reviewed the relevant pages in his [Gutmann’s] book together with our own records of interviews and notes on which those pages were based,” Clive Ansley, Gutmann’s attorney, said in a letter to Ko. “We have concluded that the entire misunderstanding and the reckless accusations which have appeared in the Taiwan[ese] media would appear to be based on language and cultural differences between the English in Mr Gutmann’s book, on the one hand, and the understanding of the relevant pages when the latter have been rendered into Chinese.”
The letter was written in response to allegations by Chinese Nationalisty Party (KMT) Legislator Lo Shu-lei (羅淑蕾) that Gutmann’s book The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting and China’s Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem says that Ko agreed to purchase human organs from China.
Ko immediately rebutted the allegations, saying that while overseeing post-transplant care at the hospital he had not conducted transplants, nor bought or sold human organs in China, adding that he merely told Gutmann in an interview in 2007 that there were some doctors in Taiwan who had been involved in the buying or selling of organs for transplant, but that he was not one of them.
Ansley backed Ko in his letter.
He wrote that, after a careful review of the relevant pages, he concluded that “no English-speaking reader has understood the caption or the text to mean anything other than that Dr Ko was being given information, rather than making a statement about the availability of Falun Gong organs in some sort of personal ‘organ broker’ deal.”
“No English-speaking reader to date has understood for one moment that Dr Ko was acting as an ‘organ broker,’” Ansley said. “No English-speaking reader to date believes that Dr Ko was trying to purchase organs himself or was in any way involved in any sort of profit-making venture.”
“We believe that language, translation and the heated environment of the political campaign for the mayoral race in Taipei may be playing a role in misconstruing the author’s intentions and clouding the issue,” he added.
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
RSS