The Taipei District Court (台北地方法院) yesterday said that the former commander of the Combined Services Force General Headquarters Wen Ha-hsiung (溫哈熊) and Ting Shou-chung (
Chiang Hsiao-chang (
Wen was interviewed by the Academia Sinica (
During the interview, Wen also said that Chiang was pregnant before she married Yu. He also said that Yu Tai-wei has once bowed to Yu Yang-ho's second wife and asked her to divorce his son so Yu junior could marry Chiang legally.
Judge Wu Ding-ya's (
The aim of an "oral history" is to propose questions or issues for researchers to investigate to amend official history books. As such, this medium should be protected as a kind of freedom of speech.
The court did not find any evidence to prove that Wen was libeling.
"It was the Academia Sinica's decision to interview Wen," said Wu. "In other words, Wen was just doing his job as an interviewee and told the interviewer what he knew. He had the right to say whatever he believed to be true. Whether to believe it or not was a decision up to the interviewer. This kind of oral history should be protected and it's more important than [ordinary] freedom of speech [issues]."
Wu said that the court believed that Wen did not intend to damage Chiang's and Yu's reputations so the libel charge against him was dropped.
As for Ting, Wu explained that as a son-in-law of Wen, Ting could not avoid being chased by the press for quotes and sound bites for news coverage. What he did was interpret what he knew or what Wen told him. As a result, the court also believed that he did not have any intention to libel the plaintiffs, either.
Wang Ching-feng (
"The book was published with Wen's authorization and he said that he would be responsible for every word he said," said Wang. "How can he make up something to ruin people's reputations like this and not to be responsible for it?"
AGING: While Japan has 22 submarines, Taiwan only operates four, two of which were commissioned by the US in 1945 and 1946, and transferred to Taiwan in 1973 Taiwan would need at least 12 submarines to reach modern fleet capabilities, CSBC Corp, Taiwan chairman Chen Cheng-hung (陳政宏) said in an interview broadcast on Friday, citing a US assessment. CSBC is testing the nation’s first indigenous defense submarine, the Hai Kun (海鯤, Narwhal), which is scheduled to be delivered to the navy next month or in July. The Hai Kun has completed torpedo-firing tests and is scheduled to undergo overnight sea trials, Chen said on an SET TV military affairs program. Taiwan would require at least 12 submarines to establish a modern submarine force after assessing the nation’s operational environment and defense
A white king snake that frightened passengers and caused a stir on a Taipei MRT train on Friday evening has been claimed by its owner, who would be fined, Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC) said yesterday. A person on Threads posted that he thought he was lucky to find an empty row of seats on Friday after boarding a train on the Bannan (Blue) Line, only to spot a white snake with black stripes after sitting down. Startled, he jumped up, he wrote, describing the encounter as “terrifying.” “Taipei’s rat control plan: Release snakes on the metro,” one person wrote in reply, referring
The coast guard today said that it had disrupted "illegal" operations by a Chinese research ship in waters close to the nation and driven it away, part of what Taipei sees a provocative pattern of China's stepped up maritime activities. The coast guard said that it on Thursday last week detected the Chinese ship Tongji (同濟號), which was commissioned only last year, 29 nautical miles (54km) southeast of the southern tip of Taiwan, although just outside restricted waters. The ship was observed lowering ropes into the water, suspected to be the deployment of scientific instruments for "illegal" survey operations, and the coast
Taiwan’s two cases of hantavirus so far this year are on par with previous years’ case numbers, and the government is coordinating rat extermination work, so there should not be any outbreaks, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director-General Philip Lo (羅一鈞) said today in an interview with the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper). An increase in rat sightings in Taipei and New Taipei City has raised concerns about the spread of hantavirus, as rats can carry the disease. In January, a man in his 70s who lived in Taipei’s Daan District (大安) tested positive posthumously for hantavirus, Taiwan’s
RSS