Pingtung County prosecutors yesterday detained two people after questioning five earlier this week in connection with allegations of vote-buying against Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Aboriginal Legislator Chien Tung-ming (簡東明).
Pingtung’s move came one day after four suspected vote-brokers allegedly working for Chien were held incommunicado following a probe by the Taichung District Prosecutors’ Office.
Pingtung prosecutor Yang Wan-li (楊婉莉) said that the county district prosecutors’ office launched an investigation after receiving reports of people paying cash in exchange for votes during the campaign for Aboriginal legislative candidates in several constituencies.
Yang said the office conducted coordinated raids with representatives from Criminal Investigation Bureau units and local police stations on Friday last week, the day before the elections, searching more than a dozen places and residences in Sandimen (三地門) and Majia (瑪家) townships. Situated in the hills and mountain areas of Pingtung, the two townships are mainly inhabited by Paiwan Aborgines.
Armed with warrants, officials detained 30 people for questioning in the operation last Friday. Five more people were summoned for questioning on Wednesday.
Two of the suspects, surnamed Wang (王) and Ma (馬), were held incommunicado yesterday morning, after investigators found cash and lists of eligible voters in their possession, Yang said.
Several residents have reportedly admitted accepting cash in exchange for votes, with Wang and Ma allegedly acting as vote-brokers for Chien, prosecutors said.
Chien, also known as Uliw Qaljupayare, is from Pingtung’s Paiwan Community, and had served as Shihzih Township (獅子) head.
He first won an Aboriginal legislative seat for the KMT in 2008, but was embroiled in litigation on vote-buying charges.
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