Former Changhua County council speaker Pai Hung-shen (白鴻森), who absconded to China late last year, was repatriated yesterday and immediately began serving his 46-month jail sentence.
Pai, his brother-in-law Lo Dao-chien (羅道堅) and friend Yang Hao-hsiung (楊浩雄) were arrested by Chinese police in Xiamen on Thursday, Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) Deputy Commissioner Chiu Feng-kuang (邱豐光) said.
CIB officers took over from Chinese police in Kinmen yesterday afternoon and boarded a flight back to Taipei.
PHOTO: CNA
The former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) speaker was sentenced in May 2006 to eight years in prison for misappropriating about NT$890,000 (US$28,000) to treat friends and supporters at hostess bars.
He was found guilty of corruption and ordered to return the money.
Pai, who was scheduled to start serving his sentence in June, was diagnosed with acute coronary syndrome and became a fugitive on Dec. 13 after escaping from Taichung Veterans General Hospital, where he had been admitted for heart surgery, but went missing.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court granted an appeal on his case and reduced his sentence to three years and 10 months in prison for returning the money.
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