The lawyer for two defendants in the Chu Mei-feng (璩美鳳) sex-VCD case will be investigated over allegations he threatened witnesses, the Taipei District Court (台北地方法院) said yesterday.
Lee Ming-yu (李明諭) is defending Kuo Yu-ling (郭玉鈴), formerly Chu's spiritual teacher, and her daughter Kao Chun-chun (高淳淳) against charges they secretly filmed Chu having sex with her married lover last year and then sold the film to a magazine.
At a pre-trial hearing for the case on Friday night, Lai Shu-chen (賴淑珍) and Lin Shih-yun (林詩韻), who had worked with Kao at a dental clinic in Taipei City's Shihlin District last year, told Judge Hsu Shih-chen (徐世楨) that Lee asked them to say something good about Kao in court.
Lai and Lin said Kao had invited them to dinner on May 4 after they received summonses but had not told them that Lee would be there.
Lee told them he would like to "discuss all the possible questions that the judges, prosecutors or other lawyers might ask in court," they said.
The lawyer asked them to "say something good about Kao" in court and that he had a "good relationship with local mafia," they said.
After Lai and Lin completed their testimony on Friday, Senior Prosecutor Chang Hsi-huai (
"Lee's behavior has violated the Criminal Code (刑法) and the Attorney Regulation Law (律師法)," Chang said in court.
Lee told the court that there had been a misunderstanding. "I know how serious and dangerous this could be and I would not risk my career by doing this," he said.
"What I told them was that I will do my best to help. I also told them that it is not easy to be a defendant's lawyer and lawyers can be threatened by the mafia as well. That was what I 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
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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