The Taipei District Court said yesterday it had received former president Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) lawsuit, but the three judges accused of abuse of power would not make any comment to avoid influencing the case.
“We respect the former president's right to litigation,” district court spokesperson Huang Chun-ming (黃俊明) said, adding that the court would begin to process the case by first using a computerized random selection process to select the judges who would preside over it.
Huang said the three judges presiding over Chen's corruption trial — Tsai Shou-hsun (蔡守訓), Hsu Chien-hui (徐千惠) and Wu Ding-ya (吳定亞) — would not be permitted to comment on the case to avoid being misinterpreted as using their judicial powers to meddle in it.
Chen's office on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the three judges, accusing them of abuse of power and violating the law and the Constitution for forming what it called “an illegal joint-decision court” to gain authority over Chen's cases.
Last month, the court extended Chen's detention for a third time. In the ruling, the judges reiterated several of the reasons cited in their previous detention rulings.
Among the reasons mentioned were that Chen could collude with witnesses, destroy evidence or try to abscond.
The court also cited Chen's “interference” with the case by talking to the public through friends and colleagues who visited him at the detention center.
Chen has been held at the Taipei Detention Center since last December.
He is suspected of money laundering, accepting bribes, forgery and embezzling NT$15 million (US$450,000) during his presidency.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the