Former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Kaohsiung City councilors Chen Chun-sheng (陳春生) and Lin Hung-ming (林宏明) yesterday were convicted in a final ruling by the Supreme Court for slandering former premier Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) during the 2008 presidential election.
In 1998, Chen released an audiotape suggesting that Hsieh’s rival in the Kaohsiung mayoral election at the time, now Vice President Wu Den-yih (吳敦義), who was seeking re-election as mayor, had had an affair with a female reporter.
Wu filed a lawsuit against Chen, who was found guilty of fabricating the tape and was sentenced to six months in prison.
In December 2006, Chen and Lin said Hsieh had given Chen the tape and asked Chen to release it.
Hsieh then filed a slander lawsuit against the two.
Chen raised the same accusation when Hsieh was representing the DPP in the 2008 presidential election.
The Supreme Court sentenced Chen and Lin to eight months in prison, and they have been deprived of their civil rights for two years.
The Supreme Court said that the pair failed to provide evidence proving the accusations against Hsieh, and that they jeopardized Hsieh’s reputation during the presidential campaign.
Responding to the verdict in a press release, Hsieh said he welcomed the decision, which proved his innocence in the case because “truth prevailed.”
Hsieh said the case had been cited by politicians and political pundits as a campaign tool to attack him in the past and his reputation had been tarnished during the long legal process.
Chen and Lin had been found guilty in all court rulings, proving that it was Lin who handed the audio recording to Chen and the two had tried to influence election results in 2006 and 2008 by providing false testimony, Hsieh said.
Additional reporting by Chris Wang
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