Government Information Office (GIO) Minister Su Jun-pin (蘇俊賓) said yesterday that an incident involving a GIO official who allegedly wrote articles defaming Taiwan and Taiwanese should not be blown out of proportion.
Su made the remarks after being asked by reporters whether the government should apologize for the alleged indiscretion by Kuo Kuan-ying (郭冠英), the acting director of the information division at Taiwan’s representative office in Toronto.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers allege that Kuo wrote articles defaming Taiwan and Taiwanese in articles penned under the pseudonym Fan Lan-chin (范蘭欽).
The GIO transferred Kuo back to Taiwan and referred him to the Judicial Yuan’s Commission on the Disciplinary Sanctions of Functionaries for investigation.
‘APPROPRIATE’
Su yesterday said the GIO’s handling of the Kuo incident was “appropriate,” as the GIO could not determine by itself whether Fan was Kuo’s pen name given the discrepancies between the GIO’s findings and Kuo’s side of story.
The GIO has come under criticism for its handling of the case.
Back in 2002, then-Kaohsiung mayor Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) offered an apology over a slip of the tongue by Wu Meng-teh (吳孟德), then director of the Public Works Bureau, for saying that the flooding that had hit the city that summer was the result of “there [being] too many Mainlanders.”
Wu subsequently stepped down to take responsibility.
Citing Wu’s case, reporters yesterday asked Su whether the government would take more actions to quell the uproar caused by the Kuo incident.
Su said that Kuo’s position was protected by laws regulating civil servants.
“[The punishment given to] Kuo could have been more severe if Kuo had been a politically appointed official or my personal secretary [rather than a civil servant],” Su said, adding that “if I offered an apology [for the incident] now, it would be tantamount to a conviction for Kuo.”
DPP
Su said that most of the articles by Fan were written between 2005 and 2007, when the DPP was in power.
“I have been reluctant to mention the fact that the articles were written during the DPP government. As I am now GIO minister, I don’t want to implicate [the former DPP government] in the Kuo affair, but the case should not be blown out of proportion,” Su said.
At a separate setting yesterday, Minister of Foreign Affairs Francisco Ou (歐鴻鍊) said he had instructed all ministry personnel stationed abroad to be strictly mindful of their conduct and speech while representing the country and that he personally believed Kuo had “entirely stepped out of bounds.”
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY JENNY W. HSU
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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