The High Court yesterday said it has rejected an interlocutory appeal for Tainan developer Lin Ming-hui (林明輝), with the judges ruling not to free Lin from detention by citing the possibility of collusion of testimony and tainting of evidence by him and other suspects in the case.
The Taiwan High Court’s Tainan branch spokesman Sheng Yang-jen (沈揚仁) said that after the district court granted a request by prosecutors that Lin be detained and held incommunicado, Lin’s lawyers filed for an interlocutory appeal.
As the owner of Weiguan Construction Co (維冠建設), Lin is the developer responsible for the Weiguan Jinlong building in Tainan, which collapsed when a magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck on Feb. 6.
One more body was found in the basement on Thursday, bringing the death toll to 115 for the collapsed building.
Investigators said they found evidence of the use of substandard materials and other major defects in the construction of the complex.
Prosecutors said the investigation had found that an insufficient number of iron rebars were used in the building’s reinforced concrete columns, with the number of rebar pieces decreasing and getting thinner from the bottom floors to upper floors.
It was also found that the interlocking arrangement of the concrete columns’ vertical rebars, stirrups, corner bars, offset bends and other pieces were not done in accordance with the required engineering standards.
Investigators also found discrepancies between the building’s structural calculation figures submitted to government agencies and the blueprints of the building’s steel and column support reinforcement, which prosecutors said indicated the actual amount of steel and iron rebar pieces used was 50 percent less than the figures officially submitted.
There were also irregularities in the building’s design and architectural process, prosecutors said.
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
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