A Taoyuan man is facing defamation charges for allegedly circulating rumors online that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was profiting from the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak, the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) said yesterday.
CIB officers on Saturday questioned Hsu Te-chung (徐德忠), 48, for allegedly using the account name Sung Chung-chi (宋中積) to post messages online that accused the DPP of hoarding surgical masks to sell at a monthly profit of NT$4.5 billion (US$148.76 million).
DPP officials filed a request for a police investigation after the claims were widely circulated on Facebook, the messaging app Line and other social media.
Photo: Chu Pei-hsiung, Taipei Times
Prosecutors said that Hsu, who works in elevator repair and is a self-professed fan of Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), created Facebook pages featuring images of Han dressed in military attire and discussion with fellow supporters of the former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate about campaign activities.
When located at his home, Hsu reportedly told CIB officers: “Why is this so serious? I had only posted these messages to a few groups on Facebook.”
Meanwhile, prosecutors said they are investigating a man and a woman who allegedly provided officials with false information after returning to Taiwan on a Jan. 16 flight from Wuhan, China, which is at the center of the 2019-nCoV outbreak.
Authorities could not locate the man, surnamed Feng (馮), and the woman, surnamed Chen (陳), at the Taipei address they provided, prosecutors said.
Health officials have ordered all travelers returning from Wuhan and Hubei Province to remain in their residences for 14 days, which is the suspected incubation period for 2019-nCoV, prosecutors said.
However, Feng and Chen yesterday spoke separately to reporters, saying that they did not know each other and that they had followed the orders about home confinement.
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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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