Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) politicians yesterday urged Tainan City Council Speaker Lee Chuan-chiao (李全教) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to resign as council speaker to shoulder his political responsibility and to preserve the integrity of the city council.
The Tainan District Court on Thursday convicted Lee of buying votes to gain election as a council member in 2014. The court verdict invalidates Lee’s election as a member and speaker of the city council.
However, Lee said he would not quit and would continue to carry out his job to preside over city council meeting proceedings.
Lee said he was planning to appeal the ruling, so he would remain at his post until the case is decided in a higher court.
DPP Tainan branch spokeswoman Chiu Li-li (邱莉莉) yesterday said that to uphold the city council’s credibility and its political legitimacy, Lee should resign from the post while awaiting the ruling on his appeal by the Taiwan High Court’s Tainan branch.
In the immediate aftermath of Lee’s conviction, Tainan Mayor William Lai (賴清德) of the DPP welcomed the verdict, saying it restored justice and fairness to society, but said that the judicial process had dragged on for too long.
“According to election law, the first ruling should take only six months and the second ruling should wrap up within one year. However, Lee has used many ploys to play games with the justice system, and the district court condoned his actions and let the case drag on for more than a year. Lee’s perversion of the judicial process has damaged our democracy,” he said.
The district court handed down a guilty verdict last July against Lee’s top aide, Huang Teng-ching (黃澄清) and two of Lee’s other campaign workers for buying votes on Lee’s behalf.
In that ruling, Huang was given a prison sentence of five years, while Lee Li-hua (李麗華) received two years and Kang Ching-liang (康清良) 19 months.
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