The Supreme Court yesterday upheld a 20-year prison sentence imposed by a lower court on a man charged with attempted bombings of a High Speed Rail train and a lawmaker’s office more than two years ago.
Hu Tsung-hsien (胡宗賢), a lawyer, was convicted in his first retrial by the Taiwan High Court on two counts of attempted murder for making bombs and planting two on a train traveling north from Taichung and two outside Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lu Chia-chen’s (盧嘉辰) office in New Taipei City.
An accomplice, Chu Ya-tung (朱亞東), was also found guilty and given a prison sentence of 10 years and six months.
The Supreme Court’s decisions cannot be appealed.
The Taiwan High Court revoked an earlier ruling it made in which Hu was found guilty of additional charges of forgery and obstruction of public utilities.
That ruling came with a 22-year sentence for Hu, while Chu was given 12 years.
The Taiwan High Court ruled that Hu had Chu had planted two suitcase bombs on the train and another two outside Lu’s office on April 12, 2013, in a convoluted scheme to manipulate the stock market.
Beyond wanting to cash in on the stock market, Hu also planned the bombings in anger at being indicted in February 2013 on charges of extortion and leaking private information, the court said.
Hu and Chu, who are both in their 40s, fled to China’s Guangdong Province after planting the bombs, but were found and arrested with the help of the Chinese authorities.
The two were repatriated on April 15, 2013.
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