The Control Yuan promised yesterday to investigate Minister Without Portfolio Chu Yun-peng’s (朱雲鵬) negligence in skipping work after accepting an appeal from a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taipei City councilor.
The Chinese-language weekly Next Magazine on Wednesday carried a story and photos of Chu and his girlfriend going out on dates during office hours. Chu, a long-term aide to President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), later said the report was true.
DPP Taipei City Councilor Hsu Chia-ching (徐佳青) yesterday said skipping work was a violation of Civil Servant Services Act (公務員服務法), and urged the Control Yuan to look into the case immediately.
Hsu said Ma had repeatedly indulged his staff who had made similar mistakes, including former chief of Taipei City’s Civil Affairs Department Ho Hung-jung (何鴻榮) and former director of Taipei City Government’s Research and Examination Department, Chou Wen-tsai (周韻采).
“The Ma administration applies double standards by being harsh on the enemy and soft on his own people. The public, especially civil servants, will not accept such double standards,” she said.
Ho was found to be absent from work in 2005 when a typhoon threatened Taiwan because he was on vacation with his secretary in Bali. He acknowledged visiting Bali with his secretary, but denied having an affair with her. Ho resigned from the position soon after the scandal, but returned to Ma’s team last year to help him campaign during the presidential election.
Chou, meanwhile, was caught doing yoga during office hours in September 2006. Ma, then the mayor of Taipei, originally gave her a written reprimand, saying this was the second-harshest punishment he could give. Chou resigned one week later, saying she did not want her foibles to be used as a tool to attack Ma.
Chou, now an associate professor at Yuan Ze University, said yesterday she had no comment on either Chu’s skipping work or the “oral reprimand” he received.
Control Yuan member Ger Yeong-kuang (葛永光) yesterday received Hsu’s report, and said the Control Yuan would investigate.
At a separate setting yesterday, when asked by reporters whether Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) would give Chu any demerits for skipping work, Executive Yuan Spokesman Su Jun-pin (蘇俊賓) repeated the oral reprimand Liu issued one day earlier.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY SHIH HSIU-CHUAN
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