The Philippines’ top judge, who walked out of an appearance at his own impeachment trial, was later rushed to hospital after suffering an apparent heart attack, his spokesman said yesterday.
Chief Justice Renato Corona checked into a hospital on Tuesday night after his three-hour appearance before the Senate, during which he denounced the landmark corruption proceedings as a personal vendetta by Philippine President Benigno Aquino III.
“The diagnosis is possible heart attack,” Corona’s spokesman, Midas Marquez, said during several radio interviews.
The development could delay resolution of the trial, which analysts warn has caused deep political divisions in one of Southeast Asia’s most free-wheeling democracies.
Corona is accused of failing to declare up to US$12 million in bank accounts and Aquino has alleged the judge sought to protect former Philippine president Gloria Arroyo, who is being tried separately for vote-rigging.
Aquino won a landslide election victory in 2010 on a platform to end pervasive corruption blamed for massive poverty, and his congressional allies impeached Corona in December, the first such move ever against a chief justice of the Supreme Court.
Corona’s Senate trial to decide whether or not he should be removed from office began a month later and has since gripped the nation with millions watching the drama live on TV.
The judge, a diabetic who previously had a heart bypass operation, stunned the Senate when he abruptly walked out following his testimony on Tuesday.
He was later brought back in a wheelchair, after his lawyers said he had fallen unwell.
However, Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile ordered him to take the stand again yesterday for cross-examination and warned his testimony would be struck off the record if he failed to do so.
Corona denied the allegations and accused Aquino of a personal vendetta after a landmark Supreme Court verdict last year that ordered the president’s clan to break up a sprawling sugar plantation and hand plots over to farmers.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver