Legislators said yesterday that they doubted the military was willing to proceed with a lawsuit seeking compensation from former minister of national defense Chen Chao-min (陳肇敏) and five others to be paid to the family of an airman wrongfully executed 15 years ago over a rape-murder case.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislator Chen Ting-fei (陳亭妃), convener of the legislature’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, invited Judicial Reform Foundation chief executive Lin Feng-cheng (林峰正) to join the committee meeting.
Lin said he had audited the first hearing of the civil suit filed by the Ministry of National Defense with the Taipei District Court on Sept. 24 and during the hearing, judges told attorneys from the military that their legal statements were too simple and not concrete enough, suggesting that they should include more content.
Attorneys acting for Chen Chao-min and the five others told judges that as Taipei prosecutors had twice decided not to indict them, they were therefore not bound to provide compensation.
Chen Ting-fei told Minister of National Defense Kao Hua-chu (高華柱) that 109 civic groups had organized an online petition insisting that Chen Chao-min and the others take responsibility for Chiang Kuo-ching’s (江國慶) wrongful execution, and that more than 120,000 people had signed it so far.
“Do you think the public do not care about this thing? What is the ministry’s attitude toward the matter?” Chen Ting-fei said.
Kao said the ministry would “definitely” work hard to win the case.
However, DPP Legislator Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) said it was evident that the ministry had adopted a passive attitude toward the civil suit.
The two attorneys representing the ministry are both young recently qualified lawyers who are currently doing their compulsory service, she said, questioning whether they had the ability to handle a case of such complexity.
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