Failing in his hope to meet the president, Lee Wen-cheng (黎文正), who had staged a hunger strike calling on the president to step down, yesterday tore up his petition and condemned the Presidential Office as being too insincere to listen to his appeals.
"The Presidential Office said that proper procedures must be followed when arranging a meeting with the president. This is an excuse. The truth of the matter is that the president didn't want to meet us and accept our petition," Lee said.
Lee -- a junior majoring in clinical psychology at Fu Jen Catholic University who was expelled last month because of poor attendance -- marched to the Presidential Office yesterday afternoon with several other student protesters to submit their petition to the president.
The group was initially halted by the police, because they hadn't applied for a permit to assemble, but was later received by the director of the Presidential Office's Department of Public Affairs, David Lee (
No consensus was reached during Lee Wen-cheng's 50-minute visit to the Presidential Office, as he insisted on meeting President Chen Shui-bian (
Lee Wen-cheng expressed his discontent on leaving the Presidential Office.
Saying he had decided to suspend his sit-in in front of Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, Lee Wen-cheng said that he would continue his effort to push for Chen to resign by collecting signatures from the public.
Lee Wen-cheng began the hunger strike a week ago but was taken to hospital for treatment after collapsing on Wednesday afternoon.
He apologized yesterday for calling Presidential Office Secretary General Mark Chen (
On Wednesday night he said: "If you [President Chen] still have a conscience, please do not send your dogs to see us."
It was apparent that he was referring to Mark Chen, who had been dispatched by the president to visit Lee Wen-cheng on Tuesday afternoon.
Lee Wen-cheng said that he had made the comment because he didn't want to see "capable officials" being ordered about like a "dog" by the president.
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