Lawmakers attending a cross-caucus negotiation yesterday agreed that judges and prosecutors convicted of corruption should return the salary they received during their trial.
The New Power Party (NPP) had proposed an amendment to the Judges Act (法官法), dubbed the “Chen Yu-chen clause.”
The Supreme Court on Feb. 27 upheld a corruption conviction against Chen Yu-chen (陳玉珍), then a prosecutor at the Taiwan High Prosecutors’ Office, for taking NT$23 million (US$739,312) in bribes from an underground casino operator, sentencing him to 12 years in prison and finalizing litigation that had lasted six years.
NPP Legislator Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) yesterday said that Chen, despite being suspended from the office in November 2012 due to the corruption charge, still collected half of her monthly salary until February, in accordance with the current law.
“Such absurdity is intolerable,” Huang said.
Legislative Speaker Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全), who convened the cross-caucus negotiation, said the status of judges is different from regular public servants, just as people generally demand more of politicians.
Democratic Progressive Party caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) agreed that the proposed amendment should be incorporated into the law.
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