A 17-year-old boy who duped former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) by posing as a fortune-teller lost a libel suit against a newspaper for branding him a liar, prosecutors in Shilin said yesterday.
The teenager, identified only by his family name, Huang, was arrested last year on fraud allegations after boasting on television about his scam targeting Chen, but was later released by a juvenile court.
In May, the teenager filed libel charges against the Chinese-language Apple Daily for calling him “the teenager who conned Chen” and “[the teenager who] conned numerous people” in one of its columns.
‘PUBLIC INTEREST’
“The case concerned public interests, and prosecutors have ruled that the report was not written with the intention to defame,” a spokesman for Shilin District Court said.
Huang’s case caused a media sensation and brought comparisons with Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in the 2002 film Catch Me If You Can amid reports that he assumed nine different identities in a series of cons.
LARGE REPERTOIRE
Huang reportedly posed as a radio station director, a hotel executive, a British passport holder with two master’s degrees and a fortune-teller.
The teenager has apologized and admitted lying about his age and fabricating his academic and work experience “out of vanity.”
Chen has accused Huang of trying to swindle money out of him after arranging a Buddhist ritual for him, but the former president denied reports that said he had received a Tarot card reading from the boy.
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