Prosecutors yesterday dismissed allegations that two former employees of Era News had harmed the company’s reputation by publishing information showing that the cable TV news channel had ignored calls for help from victims of Typhoon Morakot last year.
On Aug. 10, amid stormy weather, flooding and a slow government response, several news channels set up hotlines to take calls for help from storm victims, saying they would pass the information on to government agencies as soon as possible.
Shortly after Era News began taking calls, the two former employees, Mu Kuang-chung (穆光中) and Sheng Chi-yu (盛奇玉), wrote on their personal blogs that although the company had taken emergency calls from people in typhoon-hit areas who needed to be rescued, the company had ignored most of the messages or delayed passing on the information to the authorities in charge of rescue operations.
“A bunch of small notes full of scribbled names and phone numbers and locations were lying around on desks, ignored by everyone,” they wrote in their blog posts.
Era News then released a statement rebutting the allegation, and the two employees were fired shortly afterwards. The company also filed a libel lawsuit against the two, claiming that their accusations had harmed the company’s reputation.
However, investigations showed that Era News had only reported less than 30 of the 65 emergency calls it received to the authorities. Some of the calls for help were forwarded to authorities about 24 hours after they were received, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors found that because the two former employees had been telling the truth and did not post the information on their blogs with intent to cause harm, they would not be indicted.
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:
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