The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus yesterday urged the Ministry of Justice to identify within three days the person who leaked a document issued by the Kaohsiung Bureau of the Taiwan High Court to the Bureau of Investigation to Next Magazine.
On Wednesday the magazine published a copy of what it said was an official document signed by former Kaohsiung prosecutor Lo Chien-hsun (羅建勛) that had been sent from the Black Gold Center of the Kaohsiung Bureau of the Taiwan High Court to the Bureau of Investigation on April 3.
The magazine said Lo believed former premier Frank Hseih (謝長廷) should be indicted on corruption charges because he allegedly received illegal donations from a Kaohsiung Rapid Transit Corp (KRTC) board member and others when he was mayor of Kaohsiung.
Hsieh became a target of investigations into the KRTC bidding scandal in March last year. The magazine said Lo -- who was in charge of investigations into the 2002 KRTC scandal -- believes Hsieh violated the Statute for the Punishment of Corruption (
The Kaohsiung Bureau of the Taiwan High Court confirmed on Wednesday that the document was genuine, but said it was sent by Lo himself and that the "terminology" in the document was "flawed."
DPP legislative whip Wang Sing-nan (王幸男) told a press conference yesterday that Justice Minister Morley Shih (施茂林) and Director-General of the bureau Yeh Sheng-mao (葉盛茂) should step down should the ministry fail to discover who disclosed the document and punish the personnel involved in the leak.
"The person who leaked the document to the magazine not only violated the principle of keeping criminal investigations confidential but also sabotaged the DPP's internal harmony and contributed to a crisis of division," he said, referring to the suspicion raised by Hsieh's camp that this might be a move from one or more of the other three DPP presidential contenders to harm Hsieh's chance in the primary.
The ministry yesterday denied any "conspiracy" over the leak.
"I have ordered my ministry's officials to probe why a copy of a prosecutorial document was leaked to the magazine, and the result of the investigation will be published tomorrow [today]," Shih told a legislative judicial committee meeting yesterday when questioned by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lee Ching-hua (李慶華) over the event.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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