Supporters of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and Chiayi County Commissioner Chen Ming-wen (陳明文) yesterday rallied outside detention centers in Taipei and Chiayi counties to show their support.
Chen Shui-bian was sent to the Taipei Detention Center in Tucheng (土城), Taipei County, on Wednesday on charges of embezzlement, bribe-taking, money laundering and illegally removing classified documents from the Presidential Office.
For his part, Chen Ming-wen, of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), was detained at the Chiayi Detention Center for alleged acts of corruption.
PHOTO: CNA
About 100 Kaohsiung residents mobilized by independent Kaohsiung City Councilor Cheng Hsin-chu (鄭新助) boarded buses to Taipei Detention Center yesterday to show their support for Chen Shui-bian.
Holding up banners, the supporters shouted “A Bian innocent” and “unfair justice” to protest against his detention.
Police were deployed to the site to control the crowd. No incidents were reported.
Meanwhile, DPP Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday visited Chen Ming-wen at the Chiayi Detention Center.
Outside the detention center, a sit-in was staged by demonstrators as a show of support for Chen Ming-wen.
Deploring the fact that Chen Ming-wen was being held incommunicado without formal charges being made, Tsai said to the crowd: “This is a violation against human rights.”
“It should not happen in a democratic country,” she said.
Tsai also visited Yunlin County Commissioner Su Chih-fen (蘇治芬) at hospital yesterday where the county chief is recovering after an 11-day hunger strike.
Tsai said the party would nominate Su to run for re-election next year in Yunlin County despite her indictment on Friday on corruption charges.
After going on a hunger strike for 11 days to protest her detainment, Su was set free by the Yunlin District Court late on Friday night after she was indicted on corruption charges earlier the same day.
The court, finding there was no reason to keep Su in custody after the indictment was filed, allowed her to eb released, but required that she report any change in residence and barred her from leaving the country.
Su was charged with taking a total of NT$21 million (US$635,000) in bribes in two separate cases involving the operation of a county landfill and the expansion of the Yunlin branch of Chang Gung Memorial Hospital.
Prosecutors recommended she be sentenced to prison for 15 years, deprived of her civil rights for eight years and fined NT$21 million.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY JIMMY CHUANG
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
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
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