The chief of a police station in Greater Kaohsiung has brought charges against more than 300 netizens for leaving insulting comments about him on a Facebook posting by a young couple who accused him of wrongfully issuing them a traffic fine.
The young man, surnamed Chen (陳), and his girlfriend, surnamed Liu (劉), are also on the long list of defendants in the case, which could mark the largest number of people sued by a law enforcement officer in the nation’s history if it goes to trial.
On July 28, Chen and Liu were riding on his modified motorcycle when they were pulled over by two police officers from the Jhongjheng Third Road Police Station at the intersection of Wufu First Road and Fujian Street in Sinsing District (新興).
They were issued a NT$900 fine for operating a vehicle with modified headlights.
Liu took to Facebook to vent her anger, accusing Jhongjheng Third Road Police Station Chief Hou Ling-kuo (侯令國) of being “inhumane” by ticketing them when they were on their way to a funeral home “to see Chen’s just-deceased grandmother one last time.”
Liu added that Hou was “really condescending” and that she hoped he could “live a long life” and would “treat himself to a nice meal with the reward money he received for handing out the ticket.”
The post quickly attracted 50,000 likes, with more than 300 netizens leaving comments insulting Hou.
However, police recordings of the ticketing process showed that Hou was not even at the scene and that the ticket was actually issued by Sergeant Huang Chien-min (黃堅民) and police officer Lee Yu-hung (李宥宏), police said.
Police added that the recordings also showed Chen snarling at the two officers.
Judging from the direction the couple was heading at the time, police said it was unlikely they were going to a funeral home, adding that they might have lied about their destination to seek netizens’ sympathy.
In an effort to put a “stop to the Internet culture of blind following,” Hou decided to take legal action against the couple and those who slandered him without knowing what had really happened.
According to the police, Liu first tried to defend her Facebook comment by citing a stamp of Hou’s name on the violation ticket, accusing the police of “setting a trap” for her and her boyfriend and demanding an apology.
After learning that Hou had pressed charges against them, the couple apologized, saying they had thought Hou was the one who issued the ticket and that they did not mean to offend him, police said.
The police added that they plan to bring more defendants in for questioning in the next few days.
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