Making the telephone records of Prosecutor-General Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘) available to a Legislative Yuan task force probing a wiretapping controversy would require Huang’s consent due to their private nature, Minister of Justice Lo Ying-shay (羅瑩雪) said yesterday.
Responding to a media inquiry at the legislature in Taipei, Lo said that the task force under the Legislative Yuan’s Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee could not request Huang’s records from his phone company without Huang’s agreement because a telephone record is a personal asset.
“[The request] involves Huang’s rights, the Constitution and the Personal Information Protection Act (個人資料保護法), so I will not comment further. If [Huang] agrees, I think the request would then be legal,” Lo said.
The committee on Wednesday passed a resolution authorizing the task force, which was formed to investigate a wiretapping controversy, to examine Huang’s telephone records and records of when he visited the Presidential Office and President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) residence to report on the improper lobbying allegations involving Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘).
Huang has said that he would not agree to provide the records.
DPP lawmakers were angry at Huang’s refusal, with Ker saying that the task force would not be able to carry out its investigation without the records, which are believed to contain crucial evidence that Ma and Huang conspired to oust Wang from his position.
If the telephone records show that Huang and Ma had telephone conversations before Aug. 31, the day that both said they met for the first time to discuss Wang’s misconduct, the opposition might be able to prove that Ma, Huang and Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) have been lying to the public about the controversy.
However, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus opposed the document request, saying that if Huang’s telephone records were made public, Ma’s telephone records would inevitably be disclosed as well, which would be a violation of the Constitution.
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
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
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