A lawyer for former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) urged prison authorities yesterday to allow Chen to be given medical treatment outside of prison.
Chen’s lawyer, Shih Yi-lin (石宜琳), said he recently visited Chen at the Taipei Prison and during the meeting Chen complained about poor health, saying that he feels breathless even when sitting down and worse when walking.
“Chen has a heart problem and three prison doctors have suggested that he needs further medical examinations outside the prison,” Shih said.
Shih made the remarks on the sidelines of the start of Chen’s hearing at the Taiwan High Court on charges of embezzling from a special presidential fund.
Chen, citing his ill-health, -instructed the lawyer to speak on his behalf during the proceedings.
Shih said that the “state affairs fund” is a discretionary presidential fund and that Chen used the money according to the previous practices of the country’s former heads of state and that he had no intention of behaving in a corrupt manner.
Chen is involved in several corruption and money-laundering cases and in November, the Supreme Court sentenced him and his wife, Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍), each to 19 years in jail for taking bribes while Chen was president.
The Taiwan High Court ruled last month that Wu and Chen should each serve 17-and-a-half years.
Chen, who has been held at a detention center since late 2008, was moved to Taipei Prison in Taoyuan on Dec. 2 to serve his sentence. Prison authorities are still considering how Wu should serve her sentence, given her medical condition.
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